**V 






-J- ,\N 






'2 A 






*<>% 









V "<* 









S ■< 



,,/ 









/ c 



i 



> $ % 



v</>. 



fi 



l/>. 






V t° Nc < V c 






A v 






5 .0- 































■% 


^ 






$ 


■% -. 






^ 




V 














v 




' /• x* 








;, ^ 












*\ 








& 
















-> ' ^%JL 


Mf 




s 








o 






'% 




/ 















' 









oS ■<! 






/- * » I 















In ^ ' 









A ' 







*. ^ 









S A, 









OO 






^ v * 



. 



,0o. 









* *> 






, ^ 



,1 ' 



LETTERS 



TO 



DEAD AUTHORS 



BY ^ 

ANDREW LANG 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1886 

All rights reserved 



Tiyr 



3^ 



l/ 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



TO 

MISS THACKERAY 

THESE EXERCISES 

IN THE ART OF DIPPING 

ARE DEDICATED 



PREFACE. 



Sixteen of these Letters, which were 
written at the suggestion of the editor 
of the ' St. James's Gazette,' appeared in 
that journal, from which they are now 
reprinted, by the editor's kind per- 
mission. They have been somewhat 
emended, and a few additions have been 
made. The Letters to Horace, Byron, 
Isaak Walton, Chapelain, Ron sard, and 
Theocritus have not been published 
before. 

The gem published for the first time 
on the title-page is a red cornelian in 
the British Museum, probably Graeco- 
Roman, and treated in an archaistic 
style. It represents Hermes Psycho- 
gogos, with a Soul, and has some like- 



VI PREFACE 

ness to the Baptism of Our Lord, as 
usually shown in art. Perhaps it may 
be post-Christian. The gem was se- 
lected by Mr. A. S. Murray. 

It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that 
some of the Letters are written rather 
to suit the Correspondent than to ex- 
press the writer's own taste or opinions. 
The Epistle to Lord Byron, especially, 
is ' writ in a manner which is my aver- 
sion.' 



CONTENTS. 



I. To W. M. Thackeray 
II. To Charles Dickens . 

III. To Pierre de Ronsard . 

IV. To Herodotus .... 
V. Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope 

VI. To Lucian of Samosata 
VII. To Maltre Francoys Raeelais 
VIII. To Jane Austen .... 
IX. To Master Isaak Walton 
X. To M. Chapelain .... 
XL To Sir John Manndeville, Kt. 
XII. To Alexandre Dumas 

XIII. To Theocritus 

XIV. To Edgar Allan Poe . 

XV. To Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 
XVI. To Eusebius of C^esarea . 
XVII. To Percy Bysshe Shelley . 
XVIII. To Monsieur de Moliere, Valet 
de Chambre du Roi 
XIX. To Robert Burns . 
XX. To Lord Byron . 
XXI. To Omar Khayyam 
XXII. To Q. Horatius Flaccus . 



PAGE 

I 

10 

22 

34 

46 

55 
66 

75 
86 
98 
no 
119 
130 
140 
152 
162 

173 

184 

195 
205 
216/ 
223 



LETTERS 



TO 



DEAD AUTHORS, 



i. 

To W. M. Thackeray. 

Sir, — There are many things that 
stand in the way of the critic when he 
has a mind to praise the living. He may 
dread the charge of writing rather to 
vex a rival than to exalt the subject of 
his applause. He shuns the appearance 
of seeking the favour of the famous, and 
would not willingly be regarded as one 
of the many parasites who now advertise 
each movement and action of contempo- 
rary genius. ' Such and such men of let- 
ters are passing their summer holidays 
in the Val d'Aosta/ or the Mountains 



2 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as 
it may happen. So reports our literary 
' Court Circular,' and all our Precieuses 
read the tidings with enthusiasm. Lastly, 
if the critic be quite new to the world of 
letters, he may superfluously fear to vex 
a poet or a novelist by the abundance of 
his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us 
when, with all our hearts, we would com- 
mend the departed ; for they have passed 
almost beyond the reach even of envy ; 
and to those pale cheeks of theirs no 
commendation can bring the red. 

You, above all others, were and re- 
main without a rival in your many-sided 
excellence, and praise of you strikes at 
none of those, who have survived your 
day. The increase of time only mellows 
your renown, and each year that passes 
and brings you no successor does but 
sharpen the keenness of our sense of 
loss. In what other novelist, since Scott 
was worn down by the burden of a for- 
lorn endeavour, and died for honour's 
sake, has the world found so many of the 



THACKERAY 3 

fairest gifts combined ? If we may not 
call you a poet (for the first of English 
writers of light verse did not seek that 
crown), who that was less than a poet 
ever saw life -with a glance so keen as 
yours, so steady, and so sane ? Your 
pathos was never cheap, your laughter 
never forced ; your sigh was never the 
pulpit trick of the preacher. Your funny 
people — your Costigans and Fokers — 
were not mere characters of trick and 
catch-word, were not empty comic masks. 
Behind each the human heart was beat- 
ing ; and ever and again we were allowed 
to see the features of the man. 

Thus fiction in your hands was not 
simply a profession, like another, but a 
constant reflection of the whole surface 
of life : a repeated echo of its laughter 
and its complaint. Others have written, 
and not written badly, with the stolid 
professional regularity of the clerk at 
his desk ; you, like the Scholar Gipsy, 
might have said that ' it needs heaven- 
sent moments for this skill.' There are, 



4 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

it will not surprise you, some honourable 
women and a few men who call you a 
cynic ; who speak of ' the withered world 
of Thackerayan satire ; ' who think your 
eyes were ever turned to the sordid as- 
pects of life — to the mother-in-law who 
threatens to ' take away her silver bread- 
basket ; ' to the intriguer, the sneak, the 
termagant ; to the Beckys, and Barnes 
Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of this 
world. The quarrel of these sentimen- 
talists is really with life, not with you ; 
they might as wisely blame Monsieur 
Buffon because there are snakes in his 
Natural History. Had you not impaled 
certain noxious human insects, you would 
have better pleased Mr. Ruskin ; had 
you confined yourself to such perform- 
ances, you would have been more dear 
to the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction. 

You are accused of never having drawn 
a good woman who was not a doll, but 
the ladies that bring this charge seldom 
remind us either of Lady Castlewood or 
of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best 



THACKERAY 5 

women can pardon you Becky Sharp and 
Blanche Amory ; they find it harder to 
forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen 
Pendennis. Yet what man does not 
know in his heart that the best women 
— God bless them — lean, in their char- 
acters, either to the sweet passiveness of 
Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous 
affections of Helen ? 'T is Heaven, not 
you, that made them so ; and they are 
easily pardoned, both for being a very 
little lower than the angels and for their 
gentle ambition to be painted, as by 
Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps 
and haloes. So ladies have occasionally 
seen their own faces in the glass of fancy, 
and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola 
and Consuelo. Yet when these fair ideal- 
ists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, de- 
signed Rosamund Vincy and Horace, 
was there not a spice of malice in the 
portraits which we miss in your least 
favourable studies ? 

That the creator of Colonel New- 
come and of Henry Esmond was a 



6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

snarling cynic ; that he who designed 
Rachel Esmond could not draw a good 
woman : these are the chief charges (all 
indifferent now to you, who were once 
so sensitive) that your admirers have to 
contend against. A French critic, M. 
Taine, also protests that you do preach 
too much. Did any author but yourself 
so frequently break the thread (seldom 
a strong thread) of his plot to converse 
with his reader and moralise his tale, we 
also might be offended. But who that 
loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that 
likes the wise trifling of the one and 
can bear with the melancholy of the 
other, but prefers your preaching to 
another's playing! 

Your thoughts come in, like the 
intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an 
ornament and source of fresh delight. 
Like the songs of the Chorus, they bid 
us pause a moment over the wider laws 
and actions of human fate and human 
life, and we turn from your persons to 
yourself, and again from yourself to your 



THACKERAY J 

persons, as from the odes of Sophocles 
or Aristophanes to the action of their 
characters on the stage. Nor, to my 
taste, does the mere music and melan- 
choly dignity of your style in these 
passages of meditation fall far below the 
highest efforts of poetry. I remember 
that scene where Clive, at Barnes New- 
come's Lecture on the Poetry of the 
Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to 
him. 'And the past and its dear his- 
tories, and youth and its hopes and pas- 
sions, and tones and looks for ever 
echoing in the heart and present in the 
memory — these, no doubt, poor Clive 
saw and heard as he looked across the 
great gulf of time, and parting and 
grief, and beheld the woman he had 
loved for many years.' 

For ever echoing in the heart and pres- 
ent in the memory : who has not heard 
these tones, who does not hear them as 
he turns over your books that, for so 
many years, have been his companions 
and comforters ? We have been young 



8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and old, we have been sad and merry 
with you, we have listened to the mid- 
night chimes with Pen and Warrington, 
have stood with you beside the death- 
bed, have mourned at that yet more 
awful funeral of lost love, and with you 
have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred 
to our old and immortal affections, a leal 
souvenir! And whenever you speak 
for yourself, and speak in earnest, how 
magical, how rare, how lonely in our 
literature is the beauty of your sen- 
tences ! ' I can't express the charm of 
them ' (so you write of George Sand ; 
so we may write of you) : ' they seem to 
me like the sound of country bells, pro- 
voking I don't know what vein of music 
and meditation, and falling sweetly and 
sadly on the ear.' Surely that style, so 
fresh, so rich, so full of surprises — that 
style which stamps as classical your frag- 
ments of slang, and perpetually aston- 
ishes and delights — would alone give 
immortality to an author, even had he 
little to say. But you, with your whole 



THACKERAY 9 

wide world of fops and fools, of good 
women and brave men, of honest ab- 
surdities and cheery adventurers : you 
who created the Steynes and Nevvcomes, 
the Beckys and Blanches, Captain Costi- 
gan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong 

— all that host of friends imperishable 

— you must survive with Shakespeare 
and Cervantes in the memory and affec- 
tion of men. 



II. 

To diaries Dickens. 

Sir, — It has been said that every 
man is born a Platonist or an Aristote- 
lian, though the enormous majority of 
us, to be sure, live and die without being 
conscious of any invidious philosophic 
partiality whatever. With more truth 
(though that does not imply very much) 
every Englishman who reads may be 
said to be a partisan of yourself or of 
Mr. Thackeray. Why should there be 
any partisanship in the matter ; and 
why, having two such good things as 
your novels and those of your contem- 
porary, should we not be silently happy 
in the possession ? Well, men are made 
so, and must needs fight and argue 
over their tastes in enjoyment. For 
myself, I may say that in this matter I 



DICKENS 1 1 

am what the Americans do not call a 

' Mugwump,' what English politicians 
dub a ' superior person ' — that is, I 
take no side, and attempt to enjoy the 
best of both. 

It must be owned that this attitude 
is sometimes made a little difficult by 
the vigour of your special devotees. 
They have ceased, indeed, thank Hea- 
ven ! to imitate you ; and even in ' de- 
scriptive articles ' the touch of Mr. Gig- 
adibs, of him whom ' we almost took 
for the true Dickens/ has disappeared. 
The young lions of the Press no longer 
mimic your less admirable mannerisms 
— do not strain so much after fantastic 
comparisons, do not (in your manner 
and Mr. Carlyle's) give people nick- 
names derived from their teeth, or their 
complexion ; and, generally, we are 
spared second-hand copies of all that in 
your style was least to be commended. 
But, though improved by lapse of time 
in this respect, your devotees still put 
on little conscious airs of virtue, robust 



12 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

manliness, and so forth, which would 
have irritated you very much, and there 
survive some press men who seem to 
have read you a little (especially your 
later works), and never to have read any- 
thing else. Now familiarity with the 
pages of ' Our Mutual Friend ' and 
' Dombey and Son ' does not precisely 
constitute a liberal education, and the 
assumption that it does is apt (quite un- 
reasonably) to prejudice people against 
the greatest comic genius of modern 
times. 

On the other hand, Time is at last 
beginning to sift the true admirers of 
Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in 
the best sense of the word, is a popular 
success, a popular reputation. For ex- 
ample, I know that, in a remote and 
even Pictish part of this kingdom, a 
rural household, humble and under the 
shadow of a sorrow inevitably approach- 
ing, has found in ' David Copperfield ' 
oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sick- 
ness. On the other hand, people are 



DICKENS 13 

now picking up heart to say that ' they 
cannot read Dickens/ and that they par- 
ticularly detest ' Pickwick.' I believe it 
was young ladies who first had the cour- 
age of their convictions in this respect. 
'Tout sied aux belles,' and the fair, in 
the confidence of youth, often venture 
on remarkable confessions. In your 
' Natural History of Young Ladies ' I 
do not remember that you describe the 
Humorous Young Lady. 1 She is a very 
rare bird indeed, and humour generally 
is at a deplorably low level in England. 

Hence come all sorts of mischief, 
arisen since you left us ; and, it may be 
said, that inordinate philanthropy, gen- 
teel sympathy with Irish murder and 
arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, 
Esoteric Buddhism, and a score of other 
plagues, including what was once called 
^Estheticism, are all, primarily, due to 
want of humour. People discuss, with 

1 1 am informed that the Natural History of Young 
Ladies is attributed, by some writers, to another phi- 
losopher, the author of The Art of Pluck. 



14 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

the gravest faces, matters which prop- 
erly should only be stated as the wild- 
est paradoxes. It naturally follows that, 
in a period almost destitute of humour, 
many respectable persons ' cannot read 
Dickens,' and are not ashamed to glory 
in their shame. We ought not to be 
angry with others for their misfortunes ; 
and yet when one meets the cretins who 
boast that they cannot read Dickens, 
one certainly does feel much as Mr. 
Samuel Weller felt when he encountered 
Mr. Job Trotter. 

How very singular has been the his- 
tory of the decline of humour. Is there 
any profound psychological truth to be 
gathered from consideration of the fact 
that humour has gone out with cruelty ? 
A hundred years ago, eighty years ago 
— nay, fifty years ago — we were a cruel 
but also a humorous people. We had 
bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and 
hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights ; 
we went to see men hanged ; the pillory 
and the stocks were no empty ■ terrors 



DICKENS 1 5 

unto evil-doers,' for there was commonly 
a malefactor occupying each of these 
institutions. With all this we had a 
broad-blown comic sense. We had Ho- 
garth, and Bunbury, and George Cruik- 
shank, and Gilray ; we had Leech and 
Surtees, and the creator of Tittlebat 
Titmouse ; we had the Shepherd of the 
* Noctes,' and, above all, we had you. 

From the old giants of English fun — 
burly persons delighting in broad carica- 
ture, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, 
in swashing blows at the more promi- 
nent and obvious human follies — from 
these you derived the splendid high spir- 
its and unhesitating mirth of your earlier 
works. Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, 
and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwick- 
ians, and M^. Dowler, and John Browdie 
— these and their immortal companions 
were reared, so to speak, on the beef and 
beer of that naughty, fox-hunting, bad- 
ger-baiting old England, which we have 
improved out of existence. And these 
characters, assuredly, are your best ; by 



1 6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

them, though stupid people cannot read 
about them, you will live while there is 
a laugh left among us. Perhaps that 
does not assure you a very prolonged 
existence, but only the future can show. 
The dismal seriousness of the time 
cannot, let us hope, last for ever and 
a day. Honest old Laughter, the true 
lutin of your inspiration, must have life 
left in him yet, and cannot die ; though 
it is true that the taste for your pa- 
thos, and your melodrama, and plots 
constructed after your favourite fashion 
(' Great Expectations ' and the ' Tale of 
Two Cities ' are exceptions) may go by 
and never be regretted. Were people 
simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far 
as your pathos is concerned, a genera- 
tion ago ? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shal- 
low critic, who declared that Wordsworth 
' would never do,' cried, ' wept like any- 
thing,' over your Little Nell. One still 
laughs as heartily as ever with Dick 
Swiveller ; but who can cry over Little 
Nell ? 



DICKENS 17 

Ah, Sir, how could you — who knew so 
intimately, who remembered so strangely 
well the fancies, the dreams, the suffer- 
ings of childhood — how could you ' wal- 
low naked in the pathetic,' and massacre 
holocausts of the Innocents ? To draw 
tears by gloating over a child's death- 
bed, was it worthy of you ? Was it the 
kind of work over which our hearts 
should melt ? I confess that Little Nell 
might die a dozen times, and be wel- 
comed by whole legions of Angels, and 
I (like the bereaved fowl mentioned by 
Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved. 

She was more than usual calm, 
She did not give a single dam, 

wrote the astonishing child who diverted 
the leisure of Scott. Over your Little 
Nell and your Little Dombey I remain 
more than usual calm ; and probably so 
do thousands of your most sincere ad- 
mirers. But about matter of this kind, 
and the unsealing of the fountains of 
tears, who can argue ? Where is taste ? 
where is truth ? What tears are ' manly, 



1 8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Sir, manly/ as Fred Bayhara has it ; and 
of what lamentations ought we rather 
to be ashamed ? Sunt lacrymcz rerum ; 
one has been moved in the cell where 
Socrates tasted the hemlock ; or by the 
river-banks where Syracusan arrows slew 
the parched Athenians among the mire 
and blood ; or, in fiction, when Colonel 
Newcome said Adsum, or over the diary 
of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis 
laments, with strange tears, the death of 
Porthos. But over Dombey (the Son), 
or Little Nell, one declines to snivel. 

When an author deliberately sits down 
and says, ' Now, let us have a good cry,' 
he poisons the wells of sensibility and 
chokes, at least in many breasts, the 
fountain of tears. Out of ' Dombey and 
Son ' there is little we care to remember 
except the deathless Mr. Toots ; just as 
we forget the melodramatics of ' Martin 
Chuzzlewit.' I have read in that book a 
score of times ; I never see it but I revel 
in it — in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and 
the Americans. But what the plot is 



DICKENS 19 

all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu 
Tigg had to make in the matter, what 
all the pictures with plenty of shading 
illustrate, I have never been able to com- 
prehend. In the same way, one of your 
most thorough -going admirers has al- 
lowed (in the licence of private conver- 
sation) that ' Ralph Nickleby and Monk 
are too steep ; ' and probably a cultivated 
taste will always find them a little pre- 
cipitous. 

1 Too steep : ' — the slang expresses 
that defect of an ardent genius, carried 
above itself, and out of the air we 
breathe, both in its grotesque and in its 
gloomy imaginations. To force the 
note, to press fantasy too hard, to 
deepen the gloom with black over the 
indigo, that was the failing which proved 
you mortal. To take an instance in 
little : when Pip went to Mr. Pumble- 
chook's, the boy thought the seedsman 
'a very happy man to have so many 
little drawers in his shop.' The reflec- 
tion is thoroughly boyish ; but then you 



20 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

add, ' I wondered whether the flower- 
seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine 
day to break out of those jails and 
bloom.' That is not boyish at all ; that 
is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy 
at work. 

' So we arraign her ; but she,' the 
Genius of Charles Dickens, how brill- 
iant, how kindly, how beneficent she is ! 
dwelling by a fountain of laughter im- 
perishable ; though there is something 
of an alien salt in the neighbouring 
fountain of tears. How poor the world 
of fancy would be, how 'dispeopled of 
her dreams,' if, in some ruin of the social 
system, the books of Dickens were lost ; 
and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, 
and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers, and 
Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick 
Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish 
with Menander's men and women ! We 
cannot think of our world without them ; 
and, children of dreams as they are, they 
seem more essential than great states- 
men, artists, soldiers, who have actually 






DICKENS 21 

worn flesh and blood, ribbons and or- 
ders, gowns and uniforms. May we not 
almost welcome ' Free Education ' ? for 
every Englishman who can read, unless 
he be an Ass, is a reader the more for 
you. 






III. 

To Pierre de Ronsard, 

(PRINCE of poets.) 

Master and Prince of Poets, — 
As we know what choice thou madest 
of a sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled 
by the jealousy of Fate), so we know 
well the manner of thy chosen immor- 
tality. In the Plains Elysian, among 
the heroes and the ladies of old song, 
there was thy Love with thee to enjoy 
her paradise in an eternal spring. 

Lh du plaisant Avril la saison immortelle 

Sans eschange le suit, 
La terre sans labeur, de sa grasse mamelle, 

Toute chose y produit ; 
D'enbas la troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse, 

Nous honorant sur tous, 
Viendra nous saluer, s'estimant bien-heureuse 

De s'accointer de nous. 

There thou dwellest, with the learned 
lovers of old days, with Belleau, and Du 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 2$ 

Bellay, and Ba'if, and the flower of the 
maidens of Anjou. Surely no rumour 
reaches thee, in that happy place of 
reconciled affections, no rumour of the 
rudeness of Time, the despite of men, 
and the change which stole from thy 
locks, so early grey, the crown of laurels 
and of thine own roses. How different 
from thy choice of a sepulchre have been 
the fortunes of thy tomb ! 

I will that none should break 
The marble for my sake, 
Wishful to make more fair 
My sepulchre ! 

So didst thou'sing, or so thy sweet num- 
bers run in my rude English. Wearied 
of Courts and of priories, thou didst de- 
sire a grave beside thine own Loire, not 
remote from 

The caves, the founts that fall 
From the high mountain wall, 
That fall and flash and fleet, 
With silver feet. 



Only a laurel tree 
Shall guard the grave 



of me; 



24 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Only Apollo's bough 
Shall shade me now ! 

Far other has been thy sepulchre : not 
in the free air, among the field flowers, 
but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with 
marble for a monument, and no green 
grass to cover thee. Restless wert thou 
in thy life ; thy dust was not to be rest- 
ful in thy death. The Huguenots, ces 
nouveanx Chretiens qui la France out 
pillee, destroyed thy tomb, and the warn- 
ing of the later monument, 

ABI, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCAS HUMUlf SACRA EST, 

has not scared away malicious men. 
The storm that passed over France a 
hundred years ago, more terrible than 
the religious wars that thou didst weep 
for, has swept the column from the tomb. 
The marble was broken by violent hands, 
and the shattered sepulchre of the Prince 
of Poets gained a dusty hospitality from 
the museum of a country town. Better 
had been the laurel of thy desire, the 
creeping vine, and the ivy tree. 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 2$ 

Scarce more fortunate, for long, than 
thy monument was thy memory. Thou 
hast not encountered, Master, in the 
Paradise of Poets, Messieurs Malherbe, 
De Balzac, and Boileau — Boileau who 
spoke of thee as Ce poete orgueilleux 
trebuche de si hant ! 

These gallant gentlemen, I make no 
doubt, are happy after their own fashion, 
backbiting each other and thee in the 
Paradise of Critics. In their time they 
wrought thee much evil, grumbling that 
thou wrotest in Greek and Latin (of 
which tongues certain of them had but 
little skill), and blaming thy many lyric 
melodies and the free flow of thy lines. 
What said M. de Balzac to M. Chape- 
lain ? ' M. de Malherbe, M. de Grasse, 
and yourself must be very little poets, 
if Ronsard be a great one.' Time has 
brought in his revenges, and Messieurs 
Chapelain and De Grasse are as well 
forgotten as thou art well remembered. 
Men could not always be deaf to thy 
sweet old songs, nor blind to the beauty 



26 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

of thy roses and thy loves. When they 
took the wax out of their ears that M. 
Boileau had given them lest they should 
hear the singing of thy Sirens, then 
they were deaf no longer, then they 
heard the old deaf poet singing and 
made answer to his lays. Hast thou 
not heard these sounds ? have they not 
reached thee, the voices and the lyres 
of Theophile Gautier and Alfred de 
Musset? Methinks thou hast marked 
them, and been glad that the old notes 
were ringing again and the old French 
lyric measures tripping to thine ancient 
harmonies, echoing and replying to the 
Muses of Horace and Catullus. Re- 
turning to Nature, poets returned to 
thee. Thy monument has perished, but 
not thy music, and the Prince of Poets 
has returned to his own again in a glo- 
rious Restoration. 

Through the dust and smoke of ages, 
and through the centuries of wars we 
strain our eyes and try to gain a glimpse 
of thee, Master, in thy good days, when 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 27 

the Muses walked with thee. We seem 
to mark thee wandering silent through 
some little village, or dreaming in the 
woods, or loitering among thy lonely 
places, or in gardens where the roses 
blossom among wilder flowers, or * on 
river banks where the whispering pop- 
lars and sighing reeds make answer to 
the murmur of the waters. Such a pic- 
ture hast thou drawn of thyself in the 
summer afternoons. 

Je m'en vais pourmener tantost parmy la plaine, 
Tantost en un village, et tantost en un bois, 
Et tantost par les lieux solitaires et cois. 
J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage, 
J'aime le not de l'eau qui gazoiiille au rivage. 

Still, methinks, there was a book in the 
hand of the grave and learned poet ; 
still thou wouldst carry thy Horace, thy 
Catullus, thy Theocritus, through the 
gem-like weather of the Renouveau, 
when the woods were enamelled with 
flowers, and the young Spring was 
lodged, like a wandering prince, in his 
great palaces hung with .green : 



28 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Orgueilleux de ses fleurs, enfle de sa jeunesse, 
Loge comme un grand Prince en ses vertes maisons I 

Thou sawest, in these woods by Loire 
side, the fair shapes of old religion, 
Fauns, Nymphs, and Satyrs, and heard'st 
in the nightingale's music the plaint 
of Philomel. The ancient poets came 
back in the train of thyself and of the 
Spring, and learning was scarce less 
dear to thee than love ; and thy ladies 
seemed fairer for the names they bor- 
rowed from the beauties of forgotten 
days, Helen and Cassandra. How 
sweetly didst thou sing to them thine 
old morality, and how gravely didst thou 
teach the lesson of the Roses ! Well 
didst thou know it, well didst thou love 
the Rose, since thy nurse, carrying thee, 
an infant, to the holy font, let fall on 
thee the sacred water brimmed with 
floating blossoms of the Rose ! 

Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose, 
Qui ce matin avoit desclose 
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil, 
A point perdu ceste vespree 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 29 

Les plis de sa robe pourpree, 
Et son teint au votre pareil. 

And again, 

La belle Rose du Printemps, 
Aubert, admoneste les hommes 
Passer joyeusement le temps, 
Et pendant que jeunes nous sommes, 
Esbattre la fleur de nos ans. 

In the same mood, looking far down 
the future, thou sangest of thy lady's 
age, the most sad, the most beautiful of 
thy sad and beautiful lays ; for if thy 
bees gathered much honey 't was some- 
what bitter to taste, as . that of the Sar- 
dinian yews. How clearly we see the 
great hall, the grey lady spinning and 
humming among her drowsy maids, 
and how they waken at the word, and 
she sees her spring in their eyes, and 
they forecast their winter in her face, 
when she murmurs ' 'T was Ronsard 
sang of me.' 

Winter, and summer, and spring, 
how swiftly they pass, and how early 
time brought thee his sorrows, and grief 
cast her dust upon thy head. 



K. 



30 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Adieu ma Lyre, adieu fillettes, 
Jadis mes douces amourettes, 
Adieu, je sens venir ma fin, 
Nul passetemps de ma jeunesse 
Ne m'accompagne en la vieillesse, 
Que le feu, le lict et le vin. 

Wine, and a soft bed, and a bright fire : 
to this trinity of poor pleasures we come 
soon, if, indeed, wine be left to us. 
Poetry herself deserts us ; is it not said 
that Bacchus never forgives a renegade? 
and most of us turn recreants to Bac- 
chus. Even the bright fire, I fear, was 
not always there to warm thine old 
blood, Master, or, if fire there were, the 
wood was not bought with thy book- 
seller's money. When autumn was draw- 
ing in during thine early old age, in 
1584, didst thou not write that thou 
hadst never received a sou at the hands 
of all the publishers who vended thy 
books ? And as thou wert about put- 
ting forth thy folio edition of 1584, thou 
didst pray Buon, the bookseller, to give 
thee sixty crowns to buy wood withal, 
and make thee a bright fire in winter 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 3 1 

weather, and comfort thine old age with 
thy friend Gallandius. And if Buon 
will not pay, then to try the other book- 
sellers, ' that wish to take everything 
and give nothing.' 

Was it knowledge of this passage, 
Master, or ignorance of everything else, 
that made certain of the common stead- 
fast dunces of our days speak of thee as 
if thou haclst been a starveling, neglected 
poetaster, jealous forsooth, of Maitre 
Francoys Rabelais ? See how ignorantly 
M. Fleury writes, who teaches French 
literature withal to them of Muscovy, 
and hath indited a Life of Rabelais. 
1 Rabelais etait revetu d'un emploi hon- 
orable ; Ronsard etait traite en subal- 
terne/ quoth this wondrous professor. 
What ! Pierre de Ronsard, a gentleman 
of a noble house, holding the revenue 
of many abbeys, the friend of Mary 
Stuart, of the Due d'Orleans, of Charles 
IX., he is trait e en sub alt erne, and is 
jealous of a f rocked or unfrocked ma- 
nant like Maitre Francoys ! And then 



32 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

this amazing Fleury falls foul of thine 
epitaph on Maitre Francoys and cries, 
' Ronsard a voulu faire des vers me- 
diants ; il n'a fait que de mediants vers.' 
More truly saith M. Sainte-Beuve, ' If the 
good Rabelais had returned to Meudon 
on the day when this epitaph was made 
over the wine, he would, methinks, have 
laughed heartily.' But what shall be 
said of a Professor like the egregious 
M. Fleury, who holds that Ronsard was 
despised at Court ? Was there a party 
at tennis when the king would not fain 
have had thee on his side, declaring 
that he ever won when Ronsard was his 
partner ? Did he not give thee bene- 
fices, and many priories, and call thee 
his father in Apollo, and even, so they 
say, bid thee sit down beside him on his 
throne ? Away, ye scandalous folk, whe 
tell us that there was strife between the 
Prince of Poets and the King of Mirth. 
Naught have ye by way of proof of your 
slander but the talk of Jean Bernier, a 
scurrilous, starveling apothecary, who put 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 33 

forth his fables in 1697, a century and a 
half after Maitre Frangoys died. Bayle 
quoted this fellow in a note, and ye all 
steal the tattle one from another in your 
dull manner, and know not whence it 
comes, nor even that Bayle would none 
of it and mocked its author. With so 
little knowledge is history written, and 
thus doth each chattering brook of a 
1 Life ' swell with its tribute ' that great 
Mississippi of falsehood/ Biography. 
3 



IV. 

To Herodotus, 

To Herodotus of Halicarnassus, greet- 
ing. — Concerning the matters set forth 
in your histories, and the tales you 
tell about both Greeks and Barbarians, 
whether they be true, or whether they be 
false, men dispute not little but a great 
deal. Wherefore I, being concerned to 
know the verity, did set forth to make 
search in every manner,' and came in 
my quest even unto the ends of the 
earth. For there is an island of the 
Cimmerians beyond the Straits of He- 
racles, some three days' voyage to a 
ship that hath a fair following wind in 
her sails ; and there it is said that men 
know many things from of old : thither, 
then, I came in my inquiry. Now, the 
island is not small, but large, greater 



HERODOTUS 35 

than the whole of Hellas ; and they call 
it Britain. In that island the east wind 
blows for ten parts of the year, and the 
people know not how to cover them- 
selves from the cold. But for the other 
two months of the year the sun shines 
fiercely, so that some of them die there- 
of, and others die of the frozen mixed 
drinks; for they have ice even in the 
summer, and this ice they put to their 
liquor. Through the whole of this island, 
from the west even to the east, there 
flows a river called Thames : a great 
river and a laborious, but not to be lik- 
ened to the River of Egypt. 

The mouth of this river, where I 
stepped out from my ship, is exceedingly 
foul and of an evil savour by reason of 
the city on the banks. Now this city 
is several hundred parasangs in circum- 
ference. Yet a man that needed not to 
breathe the air might go round it in 
one hour, in chariots that run under the 
earth ; and these chariots are drawn by 
creatures that breathe smoke and sul- 



36 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

phur, such as Orpheus mentions in his 
' Argonautica,' if it be by Orpheus. The 
people of the town, when I inquired of 
them concerning Herodotus of Halicar- 
nassus, looked on me with amazement, 
and went straightway about their busi- 
ness, — namely, to seek out whatsoever 
new thing is coming to pass all over the 
whole inhabited world, and as for things 
old, they take no keep of them. 

Nevertheless, by diligence I learned 
that he who in this land knew most 
concerning Herodotus was a priest, and 
dwelt in the priests' city on the river 
which is called the City of the Ford of 
the Ox. But whether Io, when she wore 
a cow's shape, had passed by that way 
in her wanderings, and thence comes the 
name of that city, I could not (though 
I asked all men I met) learn aught 
with certainty. But to me, considering 
this, it seemed that Io must have come 
thither. And now farewell to Io. 

To the City of the Priests there are 
two roads : one by land ; and one by 



HERODOTUS 37 

water, following the river. To a well- 
girdled man, the land journey is but one 
day's travel ; by the river it is longer but 
more pleasant. Now that river flows, 
as I said, from the west to the east. 
And there is in it a fish called chub, 
which they catch ; but they do not eat 
it, for a certain sacred reason. Also 
there is a fish called trout, and this is 
the manner of his catching. They build 
for this purpose great dams of wood, 
which they call weirs. Having built 
the weir they sit upon it with rods in 
their hands, and a line on the rod, and 
at the end of the line a little fish. There 
then they ' sit and spin in the sun,' as 
one of their poets says, not for a short 
time but for many days, having rods in 
their hands and eating and drinking. 
In this wise they angle for the fish called 
trout ; but whether they ever catch him 
or not, not having seen it, I cannot say ; 
for it is not pleasant to me to speak 
things concerning which I know not the 
truth. 



38 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Now, after sailing and rowing against 
the stream for certain days, I came to 
the City of the Ford of the Ox. Here 
the river changes his name, and is called 
Isis, after the name of the goddess of 
the Egyptians. But whether the Brit- 
ons brought the name from Egypt or 
whether the Egyptians took it from the 
Britons, not knowing I prefer not to say. 
But to me it seems that the Britons are 
a colony of the Egyptians, or the Egyp- 
tians a colony of the Britons. More- 
over, when I was in Egypt I saw certain 
soldiers in white helmets, who were cer- 
tainly British. But what they did there 
(as Egypt neither belongs to Britain nor 
Britain to Egypt) I know not, neither 
could they tell me. But one of them re- 
plied to me in that line of Homer (if the 
Odyssey be Homer's), 'We have come 
to a sorry Cyprus, and a sad Egypt.' 
Others told me that they once marched 
against the Ethiopians, and having de- 
feated them several times, then came 
back again, leaving their property to the 



.HERODOTUS 39 

Ethiopians. But as to the truth of this 
I leave it to every man to form his own 
opinion. 

Having come into the City of the 
Priests, I went forth into the street, and 
found a priest of the baser sort, who for 
a piece of silver led me hither and thither 
among the temples, discoursing of many 
things. 

Now it seemed to me a strange thing 
that the city was empty, and no man 
dwelling therein, save a few priests only, 
and their wives, and their children, who 
are drawn to and fro in little carriages 
dragged by women. But the priest told 
me that during half the year the city 
was desolate, for that there came some- 
what called ' The Long,' or ' The Vac/ 
and drave out the young priests. And 
he said that these did no other thing 
but row boats, and throw balls from one 
to the other, and this they were made 
to do, he said, that the young priests 
might learn to be humble, for they are 
the proudest of men. But whether he 



40 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

spoke truth or not I know not, only I 
set down what he told me. But to any- 
one considering it, this appears rather 
to jump with his story — namely, that 
the young priests have houses on the 
river, painted of divers colours, all of 
them empty. 

Then the priest, at my desire, brought 
me to one of the temples, that I might 
seek out all things concerning Herodo- 
tus the Halicarnassian, from one who 
knew. Now this temple is not the fair- 
est in the city, but less fair and goodly 
than the old temples, yet goodlier and 
more fair than the new temples ; and 
over the roof there is the image of an 
eagle made of stone — no small marvel, 
but a great one, how men came to fash- 
ion him ; and that temple is called the 
House of Queens. Here they sacrifice 
a boar once every year ; and concerning 
this they tell a certain sacred story which 
I know but will not utter. 

Then I was brought to the priest who 
had a name for knowing most about 



HERODOTUS 4 1 

Egypt, and the Egyptians, and the As- 
syrians, and the Cappadocians, and all 
the kingdoms of the Great King. He 
came out to me, being attired in a black 
robe, and wearing on his head a square 
cap. But why the priests have square 
caps I know, and he who has been in- 
itiated into the mysteries which they call 
1 Matric ' knows, but I prefer not to tell. 
Concerning the square cap, then, let this 
be sufficient. Now, the priest received 
me courteously, and when I asked him, 
concerning Herodotus, whether he were 
a true man or not, he smiled, and an- 
swered 'Abu Goosh/ which, in the 
tongue of the Arabians, means ' The 
Father of Liars.' Then he went on to 
speak concerning Herodotus, and he said 
in his discourse that Herodotus not only 
told the thing which was not, but that 
he did so wilfully, as one knowing the 
truth but concealing it. For example, 
quoth he, ' Solon never went to see Croe- 
sus, as Herodotus avers ; nor did those 
about Xerxes ever dream dreams ; but 



42 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Herodotus, out of his abundant wicked- 
ness, invented these things. 

'Now behold,' he went on, 'how the 
curse of the Gods falls upon Herodotus. 
For he pretends that he saw Cadmeian 
inscriptions at Thebes. Now I do not 
believe there were any Cadmeian inscrip- 
tions there : therefore Herodotus is most 
manifestly lying. Moreover, this Herodo- 
tus never speaks of Sophocles the Athe- 
nian, and why not ? Because he, being 
a child at school, did not learn Sophocles 
by heart : for the tragedies of Sophocles 
could not have been learned at school 
before they were written, nor can any 
man quote a poet whom he never learned 
at school. Moreover, as all those about 
Herodotus knew Sophocles well, he could 
not appear to them to be learned by 
showing that he knew what they knew 
also.' Then I thought the priest was 
making game and sport, saying first that 
Herodotus could know no poet whom 
he had not learned at school, and then 
saying that all the men of his time well 



HERODOTUS 43 

knew this poet, 'about whom everyone 
was talking.' But the priest seemed not 
to know that Herodotus and Sophocles 
were friends, which is proved by this, 
that Sophocles wrote an ode in praise of 
Herodotus. 

Then he went on, and though I were 
to write with a hundred hands (like 
Briareus, of whom Homer makes men- 
tion) I could not tell you all the things 
that the priest said against Herodotus, 
speaking truly, or not truly, or some- 
times correctly and sometimes not, as 
often befalls mortal men. For Herodo- 
tus, he said, was chiefly concerned to 
steal the lore of those who came before 
him, such as Hecataeus, and then to es- 
cape notice as having stolen it. Also he 
said that, being himself cunning and de- 
ceitful, Herodotus was easily beguiled 
by the cunning of others, and believed 
in things manifestly false, such as the 
story of the Phoenix-bird. 

Then I spoke, and said that Hero- 
dotus himself declared that he could not 



44 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

believe that story ; but the priest re 
garded me not. And he said that Hero- 
dotus had never caught a crocodile with 
cold pig, nor did he ever visit Assyria, 
nor Babylon, nor Elephantine ; but, say- 
ing that he had been in these lands, 
said that which was not true. He also 
declared that Herodotus, when he trav- 
elled, knew none of the Fat Ones of the 
Egyptians, but only those of the baser 
sort. And he called Herodotus a thief 
and a beguiler, and ' the same with in- 
tent to deceive,' as one of their own 
poets writes. And, to be short, Hero- 
dotus, I could not tell you in one day 
all the charges which are now brought 
against you ; but concerning the truth 
of these things, you know, not least, but 
most, as to yourself being guilty or inno- 
cent. Wherefore, if you have anything 
to show or set forth whereby you may 
be relieved from the burden of these 
accusations, now is the time. Be no 
longer silent ; but, whether through the 
Oracle of the Dead, or the Oracle of 



HERODOTUS 45 

Branchidae, or that in Delphi, or Dodona, 
or of Ainphiaraus at Oropus, speak to 
your friends and lovers (whereof I am 
one from of old) and let men know the 
very truth. 

Now, concerning the priests in the 
City of the Ford of the Ox, it is to be 
said that of all men whom we know they 
receive strangers most gladly, feasting 
them all day. Moreover, they have 
many drinks, cunningly mixed, and of 
these the best is that they call Arch- 
deacon, naming it from one of the 
priests' offices. Truly, as Homer says 
(if the Odyssey be Homer's), * when that 
draught is poured into the bowl then x it 
is no pleasure to refrain.' 

Drinking of this wine, or nectar, He- 
rodotus, I pledge you, and pour forth 
some deal on the ground, to Herodotus 
of Halicarnassus, in the House of Hades. 

And I wish you farewell, and good 
be with you. Whether the priest spoke 
truly, or not truly, even so may such 
good things betide you as befall dead 
men. 



V. 

Epistle to Mr, Alexa?ider Pope. 

From mortal Gratitude, decide, my 
Pope, 

Have Wits Immortal more to fear or 
hope ? 

Wits toil and travail round the Plant of 
Fame, 

Their Works its Garden, and its Growth 
their Aim, 

Then Commentators, in unwieldy Dance, 

Break down the Barriers of the trim 
Pleasance, 

Pursue the Poet, like Actason's Hounds, 

Beyond the fences of his Garden 
Grounds, 

Rend from the singing Robes each bor- 
rowed Gem, 

Rend from the laurel'd Brows the Dia- 
dem, 



pope 47 

And, if one Rag of Character they spare, 
Comes the Biographer, and strips it 
bare ! 

Such, Pope, has been thy Fortune, such 

thy Doom. 
Swift the Ghouls gathered at the Poet's 

Tomb, 
With Dust of Notes to clog each lordly 

Line, 
Warburton, Warton, Croker, Bowles, 

combine ! 
Collecting Cackle, Johnson condescends 
To interview the Drudges of your 

Friends. 
Though still your Courthope holds your 

merits high, 
And still proclaims your .Poems Poetry, 
Biographers, un - Boswell - like, have 

sneered, 
And Dunces edit him whom Dunces 

feared ! 

They say ; what say they ? Not in vain 
You ask. 



48 LETTERS TO DEaD AUTHORS 

To tell you what they say, behold my 

Task ! 
' Methinks already I your Tears survey ' 
As I repeat ' the horrid Things they say.' ' 

Comes El — n first: I fancy you '11 agree 
Not frenzied Dennis smote so fell as he ; 
For El — n's Introduction, crabbed and 

dry, 
Like Churchill's Cudgel's 2 marked with 

Lie, and Lie ! 

' Too dull to know what his own System 

meant, 
Pope yet was skilled new Treasons to 

invent ; 
A Snake that puffed himself and stung 

his Friends, 
Few Lied so frequent, for such little 

Ends ; 
His mind, like Flesh inflamed, 3 was raw 

and sore, 

1 Rape of the Lock. 

2 In Mr. Hogarth's Caricatura. 
8 Ehvin's Pope, ii. 15. 



pope 49 

And still, the more he writhed, he stung 

the more ! 
Oft in a Quarrel, never in the Right, 
His Spirit sank when he was called to 

fight. 
Pope, in the Darkness mining like a 

Mole, 
Forged on Himself, as from Himself he 

stole, 
And what for Caryll once he feigned to 

feel, 
Transferred, in Letters never sent, to 

Steele ! 
Still he denied the Letters he had 

writ, 
And still mistook Indecency for Wit. 
His very Grammar, so De Quincey 

cries, 
" Detains the Reader, and at times 

defies ! " ' 

Fierce El — n thus : no Line escapes his 

Rage, 
And furious Foot-notes growl 'neath 

every Page : 

4 



50 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

See St-ph-n next take up the vvoful 

Tale, 
Prolong the Preaching, and protract the 

Wail! 
' Some forage Falsehoods from the 

North and South, 
But Pope, poor D 1, lied from Hand 

to Mouth ; 1 
Affected, hypocritical, and vain, 
A Book in Breeches, and a Fop in 

Grain ; 
A Fox that found not the high Clusters 

sour, 
The Fanfaron of Vice beyond his power, 
Pope yet possessed ' — (the Praise will 

make you start) — 
'Mean, morbid, vain, he yet possessed 

a Heart ! 
And still we marvel at the Man, and 

still 
Admire his Finish, and applaud his 

Skill : 

1 • Poor Pope was always a hand-to-mouth liar.' 
— Pope, by Leslie Stephen, 139. 



POPE 5 I 

Though, as that fabled Barque, a phan- 
tom Form, 

Eternal strains, nor rounds the Cape of 
Storm, 

Even so Pope strove, nor ever crossed 
the Line 

That from the Noble separates the 
Fine ! ' 

The Learned thus, and who can quite 

reply, 
Reverse the Judgment, and Retort the 

Lie? 
You reap, in armed Hates that haunt 

Your name, 
Reap what you sowed, the Dragon's 

Teeth of Fame : 
You could not write, and from unenvi- 

ous Time 
Expect the Wreath that crowns the lofty 

Rhyme, 
You still must fight, retreat, attack, de- 
fend, 
And oft, to snatch a Laurel, lose a 

Friend ! 



52 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

The Pity of it ! And the changing 

Taste 
Of changing Time leaves half your 

Work a Waste ! 
My Childhood fled your couplet's clarion 

tone, 
And sought for Homer in the Prose of 

Bohn. 
Still through the Dust of that dim Prose 

appears 
The Flight of Arrows and the Sheen of 

Spears ; 
Still we may trace what Hearts heroic 

feel, 
And hear the Bronze that hurtles on the 

Steel ! 
But, ah, your Iliad seems a half-pre- 
tence, 
Where Wits, not Heroes, prove their 

Skill in Fence, 
And great Achilles' Eloquence doth 

show 
As if no Centaur trained him, but Boi- 

leau! 



pope 53 

Again, your Verse is orderly, — and 

more, — 
\ The Waves behind impel the Waves 

before ; ' 
Monotonously musical they glide, 
Till Couplet unto Couplet hath replied. 
But turn to Homer ! How his Verses 

sweep ! 
Surge answers Surge and Deep doth call 

on Deep ; 
This Line in Foam and Thunder issues 

forth, 
Spurred by the West or smitten by the 

North, 
Sombre in all its sullen Deeps, and all 
Clear at the Crest, and foaming to the 

Fall, 
The next with silver Murmur dies away, 
Like Tides that falter to Calypso's Bay ! 

Thus Time, with sordid Alchemy and 

dread, 
Turns half the Glory of your Gold to 

Lead ; 
Thus Time, — at Ronsard's wreath that 

vainly bit, — 



54 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Has marred the Poet to preserve the 

Wit, 
Who almost left on Addison a stain, 
Whose knife cut cleanest with a poi- 
soned pain, — 
Yet Thou (strange Fate that clings to 

all of Thine !) 
When most a Wit dost most a Poet 

shine. 
In Poetry thy Dunciad expires, 
When Wit has shot 'her momentary 

Fires.' 
'T is Tragedy that watches by the Bed 
' Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty 

Red,' 
And Men, remembering all, can scarce 

deny 
To lay the Laurel where thine Ashes 

lie! 



VI. 

To Lucian of Samosata. 

In what bower, oh Lucian, of your 
rediscovered Islands Fortunate are you 
now reclining ; the delight of the fair, 
the learned, the witty, and the brave ? 
In that clear and tranquil climate, whose 
air breathes of 'violet and lily, myrtle, 
and the flower of the vine,' 

Where the daisies are rose-scented, 
And the Rose herself has got 
Perfume which on earth is not, 

among the music of all birds, and the 
wind-blown notes of flutes hanging on 
the trees, mefhinks that your laughter 
sounds most silvery sweet, and that 
Helen and fair Charmides are still of 
your company. Master of mirth, and 
Soul the best contented of all that have 
seen the world's ways clearly, most clear- 



56 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

sighted of all that have made tranquil- 
lity their bride, what other laughers 
dwell with you, where the crystal and 
fragrant waters wander round the shin- 
ing palaces and the temples of ame- 
thyst ? 

Heine surely is with you ; if, indeed, 
it was not one Syrian soul that dwelt 
among alien men, Germans and Romans, 
in the bodily tabernacles of Heine and 
of Lucian. But he was fallen on evil 
times and evil tongues ; while Lucian, 
as witty as he, as bitter in mockery, as 
happily dowered with the magic of words, 
lived long and happily and honoured, 
imprisoned in no ' mattress-grave.' With- 
out Rabelais, without Voltaire, without 
Heine, you would find, methinks, even 
the joys of your Happy Islands lacking 
in zest ; and, unless Plato came by your 
way, none of the ancients could meet 
you in the lists of sportive dialogue. 

There, among the vines that bear 
twelve times in the year, more excellent 
than all the vineyards of Touraine, while 



LUCIA N OF SAMOSATA 57 

the song-birds bring you flowers from 
vales enchanted, and the shapes of the 
Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind- 
woven raiment of sunset hues ; there, in 
a land that knows not age, nor winter, 
midnight, nor autumn, nor noon, where 
the silver twilight of summer-dawn is 
perennial, where youth does not wax 
spectre-pale and die ; there, my Lucian, 
you are crowned the Prince of the Para- 
dise of Mirth. 

Who would bring you, if he had the 
power, from the banquet where Homer 
sings : Homer, who, in mockery of com- 
mentators, past and to come, German 
and Greek, informed you that he was by 
birth a Babylonian ? Yet, if you, who 
first wrote Dialogues of the Dead, could 
hear the prayer of an epistle wafted to 
'lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of 
West,' you might visit once more a world 
so worthy of such a mocker, so like the 
world you knew so well of old. 

Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of 
your sense and of your mockery ! Here, 



58 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

where faith is sick and superstition is 
waking afresh ; where gods come rarely, 
and spectres appear at five 'shillings an 
interview ; where science is popular, and 
philosophy cries aloud in the market- 
place, and clamour does duty for govern- 
ment, and Thais and Lais are names of 
power — here, Lucian, is room and scope 
for you. Can I not imagine a new * Auc- 
tion of Philosophers,' and what wealth 
might be made by him who bought 
these popular sages and lecturers at 
his estimate, and vended them at their 
own ? 

Hermes : Whom shall we put first up 
to auction ? 

Zeus : That German in spectacles ; 
he seems a highly respectable man. 

Hermes : Ho, Pessimist, come down 
and let the public view you. 

Zeus : Go on, put him up and have 
done with him. 

Hermes : Who bids for the Life Mis- 
erable, for extreme, complete, perfect, 
unredeemable perdition ? What offers 



LUC IAN OF S AMOS ATA 59 

for the universal extinction of the spe- 
cies, and the collapse of the Conscious ? 

A Purchaser : He does not look at 
all a bad lot. May one put him through 
his paces ? 

Hermes : Certainly ; try your luck. 

Purchaser : What is your name ? 

Pessimist : Hartmann. 

Purchaser : What can you teach me ? 

Pessimist : That Life is not worth 
Living. 

Purchaser : Wonderful ! Most edi- 
fying ! How much for this lot ? 

Hermes : Two hundred pounds. 

Purchaser : I will write you a cheque 
for the money. Come home, Pessimist, 
and begin your lessons without more 
ado. 

Hermes : Attention ! Here is a mag- 
nificent article — the Positive Life, the 
Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life. 
Who bids for a possible place in the 
Calendar of the Future ? 

Purchaser : What does he call him- 
self ? he has a very French air. 



60 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Hermes : Put your own questions. 

Purchaser : What 's your pedigree, 
my Philosopher, and previous perform- 
ances ? 

Positivist : I am by Rousseau out of 
Catholicism, with a strain of the Evolu- 
tion blood. 

Purchaser : What do you believe in ? 

Positivist : In Man, with a large M. 

Purchaser : Not in individual Man ? 

Positivist : By no means ; not even 
always in Mr. Gladstone. All men, all 
Churches, all parties, all philosophies, 
and even the other sect of our own 
Church, are perpetually in the wrong. 
Buy me, and listen to me, and you will 
always be in the right. 

Purchaser : And, after this life, what 
have you to offer me ? 

Positivist : A distinguished position 
in the Choir Invisible ; but not, of course, 
conscious immortality. 

Purchaser : Take him away, and put 
up another lot. 

Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, 



LUCIA N OF S AMOS AT A 6 1 

and the Darwinian, with his notions, and 
the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mix- 
ture of Religion and Evolution, and the 
Spencerian, with that Absolute which 
is a sort of a something, might all be 
offered with their divers wares ; and 
cheaply enough, Lucian, you would value 
them in this auction of Sects. ' There 
is but one way to Corinth,' as of old ; but 
which that way may be, oh master of 
Hermotimus, we know no more than he 
did of old ; and still we find, of all phi- 
losophies, that the Stoic route is most to 
be recommended. But we have our Cy- 
renaics too, though they are no longer 
* clothed in purple, and crowned with 
flowers, and fond of drink and of female 
flute-players.' Ah, here too, you might 
laugh, and fail to see where the Pleasure 
lies, when the Cyrenaics are no 'judges 
of cakes ' (nor of ale, for that matter), 
and are strangers in the Courts of 
Princes. ' To despise all things, to make 
use of all things, in all things to follow 
pleasure only : ' that is not the manner 



62 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

of the new, if it were the secret of the 
older Hedonism. 

Then, turning from the philosophers 
to the seekers after a sign, what change, 
Lucian, would you find in them and their 
ways ? None ; they are quite unaltered. 
Still our Perigrinus, and our Perigrina 
too, come to us from the East, or, if 
from the West, they take India on their 
way — India, that secular home of driv- 
elling creeds, and of religion in its sacer- 
dotage. Still they prattle of Brahmins 
and Buddhism ; though, unlike Peregri- 
nus, they do not publicly burn them- 
selves on pyres, at Epsom Downs, after 
the Derby. We are not so fortunate in 
the demise of our Theosophists ; and 
our police, less wise than the Helleno- 
dicae, would probably not permit the Im- 
molation of the Quack. Like your Alex- 
ander, they deal in marvels and mira- 
cles, oracles and warnings. All such 
bogy stories as those of your ' Philo- 
pseudes,' and the ghost of the lady who 
took to table-rapping because one of her 



LUC I AN OF S AMOS ATA 63 

best slippers had not been burned with 
her body, are gravely investigated by the 
Psychical Society. 

Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still 
with us — the man without a tinge of 
letters, who buys up old manuscripts 
'because they are stained and gnawed, 
and who goes, for proof of valued an- 
tiquity, to the testimony of the book- 
worms.' And the rich Bibliophile now, 
as in your satire, clothes his volumes in 
purple morocco and gay dorures, while 
their contents are sealed to him. 

As to the topics of satire and gay 
curiosity which occupy the lady known 
as ' Gyp,' and M. Halevy in his ' Les 
Petites Cardinal,' if you had not ex- 
hausted the matter in your ' Dialogues of 
Hetairai,' you would be amused to find 
the same old traits surviving without a 
touch of change. One reads, in Halevy's 
French, of Madame Cardinal, and, in 
your Greek, of the mother of Philinna, 
and marvels that eighteen hundred years 
have not in one single trifle altered the 



64 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

mould. Still the old shabby light-loves, 
the old greed, the old luxury and squalor. 
Still the unconquerable superstition that 
now seeks to tell fortunes by the cards, 
and, in your time, resorted to the sor- 
ceress with her magical 'bull-roarer' or 
tumdun} 

Yes, Lucian, we are the same vain 
creatures of doubt and dread, of unbelief 
and credulity, of avarice and pretence, 
that you knew, and at whom you smiled. 
Nay, our very ■ social question ' is not 
altered. Do you not write, in 'The 
Runaways,' ' The artisans will abandon 
their workshops, and leave their trades, 
when they see that, with all the labour 
that bows their bodies from dawn to 
dark, they make a petty and starveling 
pittance, while men that toil not nor 
spin are floating in Pactolus ' ? 

They begin to see this again as of 

1 The Greek p6,ufios, mentioned by Lucian and 
Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Austra- 
lians — the turndun. 



LUCIA N OF S AMOS ATA 65 

yore ; but whether the end of their vis- 
ion will be a laughing matter, you, for- 
tunate Lucian, do not need to care. Hail 
to you, and farewell ! 
5 



VII. 



To Maitre Francoys Rabelais. 



OF THE COMING OF THE COQCIGRUES. 

Master, — In the Boreal and Septen- 
trional lands, turned aside from the 
noonday and the sun, there dwelt of old 
(as thou knowest, and as Olaus vouch- 
eth) a race of men, brave, strong, nim- 
ble, and adventurous, who had no other 
care but to fight and drink. There, by 
reason of the cold (as Virgil witnesseth), 
men break wine with axes. To their 
minds, when once they were dead and 
gotten to Valhalla, or the place of their 
Gods, there would be no other pleasure 
but to swig, tipple, drink, and boose till 
the coming of that last darkness and 
Twilight, wherein they, with their dei- 
ties, should do battle against the enemies 



RABELAIS 6 J 

of all mankind; which day they rather 
desired than dreaded. 

So chanced it also with Pantagruel 
.and Brother John and their company, 
after they had once partaken of the se- 
cret of the Dive Bouteille. Thereafter 
they searched no longer; but, abiding at 
their ease, were merry, frolic, jolly, gay, 
glad, and wise ; only that they always 
and ever did expect the awful Coming 
of the Coqcigrues. Now concerning the 
day of that coming, and the nature of 
them that should come, they knew noth- 
ing ; and for his part Panurge was all 
the more adread, as Aristotle testifieth 
that men (and Panurge above others) 
most fear that which they know least. 
Now it chanced one day, as they sat at 
meat, with viands rare, dainty, and pre- 
cious as ever Apicius dreamed of, that 
there fluttered on the air a faint sound 
as of sermons, speeches, orations, ad- 
dresses, discourses, lectures, and the 
like; whereat Panurge, pricking up his 
ears, cried, * Methinks this wind bloweth 



68 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

from Midlothian,' and so fell a trem- 
bling. 

Next, to their aural orifices, and the 
avenues audient of the brain, was borne 
a very melancholy sound as of harmo- 
niums, hymns, organ-pianos, psalteries, 
and the like, all playing different airs, in 
a kind most hateful to the Muses. Then 
said Panurge, as well as he might for 
the chattering of his teeth : 'May I never 
drink if here come not the Coqcigrues!' 
and this saying and prophecy of his was 
true and inspired. But thereon the oth- 
ers began to mock, flout, and gird at 
Panurge for his cowardice. ' Here am 
I! ' cried Brother John, 'well-armed and 
ready to stand a siege ; being entrenched, 
fortified, hemmed - in and surrounded 
with great pasties, huge pieces of salted 
beef, salads, fricassees, hams, tongues, 
pies, and a wilderness of pleasant little 
tarts, jellies, pastries, trifles, and fruits 
of all kinds, and I shall not thirst while 
I have good wells, founts, springs, and 
sources of Bordeaux wine, Burgundy, 



RABELAIS 69 

wine of the Champagne country, sack 
and Canary. A fig for thy Coqcigrues ! ' 

But even as he spoke there ran up 
suddenly a whole legion, or rather army, 
of physicians, each armed with laryngo- 
scopes, stethoscopes, horoscopes, micro- 
scopes, weighing machines, and such 
other tools, engines, and arms as they 
had who, after thy time, persecuted 
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac ! And they 
all, rushing on Brother John, cried out 
to him, ' Abstain ! Abstain ! ' And one 
said, ' I have well diagnosed thee, and 
thou art in a fair way to have the gout.' 
'I never did better in my days,' said 
Brother John. ' Away with thy meats 
and drinks ! ' they cried. And one said, 
1 He must to Royat ; ' and another, 
1 Hence with him to Aix ; ' and a third, 
'Banish him to Wiesbaden;' and a 
fourth, ' Hale him to Gastein ; ' and yet 
another, ' To Barbouille with him in 
chains ! ' 

And while others felt his pulse and 
looked at his tongue, they all wrote pre- 



70 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

scriptions for him like men mad. ' For 
thy eating,' cried he that seemed to be 
their leader, ' No soup ! ' * No soup ! ' 
quoth Brother John ; and those cheeks 
of his, whereat you might have warmed 
your two hands in the winter solstice, 
grew white as lilies. ' Nay ! and no sal- 
mon, nor any beef nor mutton ! A little 
chicken by times, but pericido tuo / 
Nor any game, such as grouse, partridge, 
pheasant, capercailzie, wild duck ; nor 
any cheese, nor fruit, nor pastry, nor 
coffee, nor eau de vie ; and avoid all 
sweets. No veal, pork, nor made dishes 
of any kind.' ' Then what may I eat ? ' 
quoth the good Brother, whose valour 
had oozed out of the soles of his san- 
dals. ' A little cold bacon at breakfast 
— no eggs,' quoth the leader of the 
strange folk, ' and a slice of toast with- 
out butter.' 'And for thy drink* — 
(' What ? ' gasped Brother John) — ' one 
dessert-spoonful of whisky, with a pint 
of the water of Apollinaris at luncheon 
and dinner. No more ! ' At this 



RABELAIS yi 

Brother John fainted, falling like a 
great buttress of a hill, such as Tayge- 
tus or Ery man thus. 

While they were busy with him, oth- 
ers of the frantic folk had built great 
platforms of wood, whereon they all 
stood and spoke at once, both men and 
women. And of these some wore red 
crosses on their garments, which mean- 
eth ' Salvation ; ' and others wore white 
crosses, with a little black button of 
crape, to signify ' Purity ; ' and others 
bits of blue to mean ' Abstinence.' 
While some of these pursued Panurge 
others did beset Pantagruel ; asking him 
very long questions, whereunto he gave 
but short answers. Thus they asked : — 

Have ye Local Option here ? — Pan. : 
What? 

May one man drink if his neighbour 
be not athirst ? — Pan. : Yea ! 

Have ye Free Education ? — Pan. : 
What ? 

Must they that have, pay to school 
them that have not ? — Pan. : Nay ! 



72 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Have ye free land ? — Pan. : What ? 

Have ye taken the land from the 
farmer, and given it to the tailor out of 
work and the candlemaker masterless ? 

— Pan. : Nay ! 

Have your women folk votes ? — 
Pan. : Bosh ! 

Have ye got religion ? — Pan. : How ? 

Do you go about the streets at night, 
brawling, blowing a trumpet before 
you, and making long prayers ? — Pan. : 
Nay! 

Have you manhood suffrage? — Pan. ; 
Eh? 

Is Jack as good as his master ? — 
Pan. : Nay ! 

Have you joined the Arbitration So- 
ciety ? — Pan. : Quoy ? 

Will you let another kick you, and 
will you ask his neighbour if you de- 
serve the same ? — Pan. : Nay ? 

Do you eat what you list ? — Pan. : 
Ay! 

Do you drink when you are athirst ? 

— Pan.: Ay! 



RABELAIS 73 

Are you governed by the free ex- 
pression of the popular will ? — Pan. : 
How? 

Are you servants of priests, pulpits, 
and penny papers ? — Pan. : No ! 

Now, when they heard these answers 
of Pantagruel they all fell, some a weep- 
ing, some a praying, some a swearing, 
some an arbitrating, some a lecturing, 
some a caucussing, some a preaching, 
some a faith-healing, some a miracle- 
working, some a hypnotising, some a 
writing to the daily press ; and while 
they were thus busy, like folk distraught, 
' reforming the island,' Pantagruel burst 
out a laughing ; whereat they were 
greatly dismayed ; for laughter killeth 
the whole race of Coqcigrues, and they 
may not endure it. 

Then Pantagruel and his company 
stole aboard a barque that Panurge had 
ready in the harbour. And having pro- 
visioned her well with store of meat and 
good drink, they set sail for the king- 
dom of Entelechy, where, having landed, 



74 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

they were kindly entreated ; and there 
abide to this day ; drinking of the sweet 
and eating of the fat, under the protec- 
tion of that intellectual sphere which 
hath in all places its centre and nowhere 
its circumference. 

Such was their destiny ; there was 
their end appointed, and thither the 
Coqcigrues can never come. For all 
the air of that land is full of laughter, 
which killeth Coqcigrues ; and there 
aboundeth the herb Pantagruelion. But 
for thee, Master Francoys, thou art not 
well liked in this island of ours, where 
the Coqcigrues are abundant, very fierce, 
cruel, and tyrannical. Yet thou hast 
thy friends, that meet and drink to thee 
and wish thee well wheresoever thou 
hast found thy grand pent-etre. 



VIII. 

To yane Austen. 

Madam, — If to the enjoyments of 
your present state be lacking a view of 
the minor infirmities or foibles o£ men, 
I cannot but think (were the thought 
permitted) that your pleasures are yet 
incomplete. Moreover, it is certain that 
a woman of parts who has once meddled 
with literature will never wholly lose 
her love for the discussion of that deli- 
cious topic, nor cease to relish what (in 
the cant of our new age) is styled ' liter- 
ary shop.' For these reasons I attempt 
to convey to you some inkling of the 
present state of that agreeable art which 
you, madam, raised to its highest pitch 
of perfection. 

As to your own works (immortal, as 
I believe), I have but little that is wholly 



J6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

cheering to tell one who, among women 
of letters, was almost alone in her free- 
dom from a lettered vanity. You are 
not a very popular author : your volumes 
are not found in gaudy covers on every 
bookstall ; or, if found, are not perused 
with avidity by the Emmas and Cather- 
ines of our generation. 'T is not long 
since a blow was dealt (in the estimation 
of the unreasoning) at your character as 
an author by the publication of your 
familiar letters. The editor of these 
epistles, unfortunately, did not always 
take your witticisms, and he added oth- 
ers which were too unmistakably his 
own. While the injudicious were disap- 
pointed by the absence of your exqui- 
site style and humour, the wiser sort 
were the mere convinced of your wis- 
dom. In your letters (knowing your 
correspondents) you gave but the small 
personal talk of the hour, for them suffi- 
cient ; for your books you reserved 
matter and expression which are imper- 
ishable. Your admirers, if not very 



JANE AUSTEN JJ 

numerous, include all persons of taste, 
who, in your favour, are apt somewhat 
to abate the rule, or shake off the habit, 
which commonly confines them to but 
temperate laudation. 

'Tis the fault of all art to seem an- 
tiquated and faded in the eyes of the 
succeeding generation. The manners of 
your age were not the manners of to-day, 
and young gentlemen and ladies who 
think Scott 'slow,' think Miss Austen 
'prim' and 'dreary.' Yet, even could 
you return among us, I scarcely believe 
that, speaking the language of the hour, 
as you might, and versed in its habits, 
you would win the general admiration. 
For how tame, madam, are your charac- 
ters, especially your favourite heroines ! 
how limited the life which you knew 
and described ! how narrow the range of 
your incidents ! how correct your gram- 
mar ! 

As heroines, for example, you chose 
ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth, and 
Catherine : women remarkable neither 



?8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

for the brilliance nor for the degradation 
of their birth ; women wrapped up in 
their own and the parish's concerns, ig- 
norant of evil, as it seems, and unac- 
quainted with vain yearnings and inter- 
esting doubts. Who can engage his 
fancy with their match-makings and the 
conduct of their affections, when so many 
daring and dazzling heroines approach 
and solicit his regard ? 

Here are princesses dressed in white 
velvet stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys 
— ladies with hearts of ice and lips of 
fire, who count their roubles by the mil- 
lion, their lovers by the score, and even 
their husbands, very often, in figures of 
some arithmetical importance. With 
these are the immaculate daughters of 
itinerant Italian musicians, maids whose 
souls are unsoiled amidst the contamina- 
tions of our streets, and whose acquain- 
tance with the art of Phidias and Prax- 
iteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the 
more admirable, because entirely derived 
from loving study of the inexpensive col- 



JANE AUSTEN fg 

lections vended by the plaster-of-Paris 
man round the corner. When such 
heroines are wooed by the nephews of 
Dukes, where are your Emmas and Eliz- 
abeths ? Your volumes neither excite 
nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by 
that modern and scientific fiction, which 
is greatly admired, I learn, in the United 
States, as well as in France and at 
home. 

You erred, it cannot be denied, with 
your eyes open. Knowing Lydia and 
Kitty so intimately as you did, why did 
you make of them almost insignificant 
characters ? With Lydia for a heroine 
you might have gone far ; and, had you 
devoted three volumes, and the chief of 
your time, to the passions of Kitty, you 
might have held your own, even now, in 
the circulating library. How Lyddy, 
perched on a corner of the roof, first 
beheld her Wickham ; how, on her chal- 
lenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her 
side ; how they kissed, caressed, swung 
on gates together, met at odd seasons, 



80 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

in strange places, and finally eloped : all 
this might have been put in the mouth 
of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, 
and you would not have been less popu- 
lar than several favourites of our time. 
Had you* cast the whole narrative into 
the present tense, and lingered lovingly 
over the thickness of Mary's legs and 
the softness of Kitty's cheeks, and the 
blonde flumness of Wickham's whiskers, 
you would have left a romance still dear 
to young ladies. 

Or again, you might entrance your 
students still, had you concentrated your 
attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped 
with Henry Crawford. These should 
have been the chief figures of ' Mansfield 
Park.' But you timidly decline to tackle 
Passion. ' Let other pens,' you write, 
'dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such 
odious subjects as soon as I can.' Ah, 
there is the secret of your failure ! Need 
I add that the vulgarity and narrowness 
of the social circles you describe impair 
your popularity ? I scarce remember 



JANE AUSTEN 8 1 

more than one lady of title, and but very- 
few lords (and these unessential) in all 
your tales. Now, when we all wish to 
be in society, we demand plenty of titles 
in our novels, at any rate, and we get 
lords (and very queer lords) even from 
Republican authors, born in a country 
which in your time was not renowned 
for its literature. I have heard a critic 
remark, with a decided air of fashion, 
on the brevity of the notice which your 
characters give each other when they 
offer invitations to dinner. ' An invita- 
tion to dinner next day was despatched/ 
and this demonstrates that your acquain- 
tance ' went out ' very little, and had but 
few engagements. How vulgar, too, is 
one of your heroines, who bids Mr. 
Darcy ' keep his breath to cool his por- 
ridge.' I blush for Elizabeth ! It were 
superfluous to add that your characters 
are debased by being invariably mere 
members of the Church of England as 
by law established. The Dissenting en- 
thusiast, the open soul that glides from 
6 



82 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation 
Army, and from the Higher Pantheism 
to the Higher Paganism, we look for in 
vain among your studies of character. 
Nay, the very words I employ are of un- 
known sound to you ; so how can you 
help us in the stress of the soul's trav- 
ailings ? 

You may say that the soul's travail- 
ings are no affair of yours ; proving 
thereby that you have indeed but a 
lowly conception of the duty of the nov- 
elist. I only remember one reference, 
in all your works, to that controversy 
which occupies the chief of our attention 
— the great controversy on Creation or 
Evolution. Your Jane Bennet cries : i I 
have no idea of there being so much De- 
sign in the world as some persons imag- 
ine.' Nor do you touch on our mighty 
social question, the Land Laws, save 
when Mrs. Bennet appears as a Land 
Reformer, and rails bitterly against the 
cruelty ' of settling an estate away from 
a family of five daughters, in favour of 



JANE AUSTEN 83 

a man whom nobody cared anything 
about.' There, madam, in that cruelly 
unjust performance, what a text you had 
for a Tendenz-Roman. Nay, you can al- 
low Kitty to report that a Private had 
been flogged, without introducing a chap- 
ter on Flogging in the Army. But you 
formally declined to stretch your matter 
out, here and there, 'with solemn spe- 
cious nonsense about something uncon- 
nected with the story.' No 'padding' 
for Miss Austen ! In fact, madam, as 
you were born before Analysis came in, 
or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or 
Irreverence, or Religious Open-minded- 
ness, you really cannot hope to rival 
your literary sisters in the minds of a 
perplexed generation. Your heroines 
are not passionate, we do not see their 
red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled 
in the manner of our frank young Mae- 
nads. What says your best successor, a 
lady who adds fresh lustre to a name 
that in fiction equals yours ? She says 
of Miss Austen : ' Her heroines have a 



84 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

stamp of their own. They have a certain 
gentle self-respect and humour and hard- 
ness of heart. . . . Love with them does 
not mean a passion as much as an inter- 
est, deep and silent.' I think one pre- 
fers them so, and that Englishwomen 
should be more like Anne Elliot than 
Maggie Tulliver. ' All the privilege I 
claim for my own sex is that of loving 
longest when existence or when hope is 
gone,' said Anne ; perhaps she insisted 
on a monopoly that neither sex has all 
to itself. Ah, madam, what a relief it 'is 
to come back to your witty volumes, and 
forget the follies of to-day in those of 
Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet ! How 
fine, nay, how noble is your art in its 
delicate reserve, never insisting, never 
forcing the note, never pushing the 
sketch into the caricature ! You worked 
without thinking of it, in the spirit of 
Greece, on a labour happily limited, and 
exquisitely organised. ' Dear books,' we 
say, with Miss Thackeray — 'dear books, 



JANE AUSTEN 85 

bright, sparkling with wit and animation, 
in which the homely heroines charm, 
the dull hours fly, and the very bores 
are enchanting.' 



IX. 

To Master Isaak Walton. 

Father Isaak, — When I would be 
quiet and go angling it is my custom to 
carry in my wallet thy pretty book, ' The 
Compleat Angler.' Here, methinks, if 
I find not trout I shall find content, 
and good company, and sweet songs, fair 
milkmaids, and country mirth. For you 
are to know that trout be now scarce, 
and whereas he was ever a fearful fish, 
he hath of late become so wary that 
none but the cunningest anglers may be 
even with him. 

It is not as it was in your time, Fa- 
ther, when a man might leave his shop 
in Fleet Street, of a holiday, and, when 
he had stretched his legs up Tottenham 
Hill, come lightly to meadows chequered 
with waterlilies and lady-smocks, and so 



ISAAK WALTON Zj 

fall to his sport. Nay, now have the 
houses so much increased, like a spread- 
ing sore (through the breaking of that 
excellent law of the Conscientious King 
and blessed Martyr, whereby building 
beyond the walls was forbidden), that the 
meadows are all swallowed up in streets. 
And as to the River Lea, wherein you 
took many a good trout, I read in the 
news sheets that ' its bed is many inches 
thick in horrible filth, and the air for 
more than half a mile on each side of it 
is polluted with a horrible, sickening 
stench,' so that we stand in dread of a 
new Plague, called the Cholera. And 
so it is all about London for many miles, 
and if a man, at heavy charges, betake 
himself to the fields, lo you, folk are 
grown so greedy that none will suffer 
a stranger to fish in his water. ' 

So poor anglers are in sore straits. 
Unless a man be rich and can pay great 
rents, he may not fish, in England, and 
hence spring the discontents of the 
times, for the angler is full of content, if 



88 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

he do but take trout, but if he be driven 
from the waterside, he falls, perchance, 
into evil company, and cries out to di- 
vide the property of the gentle folk. As 
many now do, even among Parliament- 
men, whom you loved not, Father Isaak, 
neither do I love them more than Rea- 
son and Scripture bid each of us be 
kindly to his neighbour. But, behold, the 
causes of the ill content are not yet all 
expressed, for even where a man hath 
licence to fish, he will hardly take trout 
in our age, unless he be all the more 
cunning. For the fish, harried this way 
and that by so many of your disciples, is 
exceeding shy and artful, nor will he bite 
at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just 
above his mouth, and floateth dry over 
him, for all the world like the natural 
cphemeris. And we may no longer angle 
with worm for him, nor with penk or 
minnow, nor with the natural fly, as was 
your manner, but only with the artificial, 
for the more difficulty the more diver- 
sion. For my part I may cry, like Via- 



ISAAK WALTON 89 

tor in your book, ' Master, I can neither 
catch with the first nor second Angle : I 
have no fortune.' 

So we fare in England, but somewhat 
better north of the Tweed, where trout 
are less wary, but for the most part 
small, except in the extreme rough north, 
among horrid hills and lakes. Thither, 
Master, as methinks you may remember, 
went Richard Franck, that called him- 
self Philanthropic, and was, as it were, 
the Columbus of anglers, discovering for 
them a new Hyperborean world. But 
Franck, doubtless, is now an angler in 
the Lake of Darkness, with Nero and 
other tyrants, for he followed after Crom- 
well, the man of blood, in the old riding 
days. How wickedly doth Franck boast 
of that leader of the giddy multitude, 
'when they raged, and became restless 
to find out misery for themselves and 
others, and the rabble would herd them- 
selves together,' as you said, 'and en- 
deavour to govern and act in spite of au- 
thority.' So you wrote ; and what said 



90 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Franck, that recreant angler ? Doth he 
not praise 'Ireton, Vane, Nevill, and 
Martin, and the most renowned, valor- 
ous, and victorious conqueror, Oliver 
Cromwell.' Natheless, with all his sins 
on his head, this Franck discovered 
Scotland for anglers, and my heart turns 
to him when he praises 'the glittering 
and resolute streams of Tweed.' 

In those wilds of Assynt and Loch 
Rannoch, Father, we, thy followers, may 
yet take trout, and forget the evils of 
the times. But, to be done with Franck, 
how harshly he speaks of thee and thy 
book. ' For you may dedicate your opin- 
ion to what scribbling putationer you 
please ; the Compleat Angle}' if you will, 
who tells you of a tedious fly story, ex- 
travagantly collected from antiquated 
authors, such as Gesner and Dubravius.' 
Again, he speaks of ' Isaac Walton, 
whose authority to me seems alike au- 
thentick, as is the general opinion of the 
vulgar prophet,' &c. 

Certain I am that Franck, if a better 



ISAAK WALTON 9 1 

angler than thou, was a worse man, who, 
writing his ' Dialogues Piscatorial ' or 
* Northern Memoirs ' five years after the 
world welcomed thy ' Compleat Angler,' 
was jealous of thy favour with the peo- 
ple, and, may be, hated thee for thy loy- 
alty and sound faith. But, Master, like 
a peaceful man avoiding contention, 
thou didst never answer this blustering 
Franck, but wentest quietly about thy 
quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora 
and windy Assynt. How could this 
noisy man know thee — and know thee 
he did, having argued with thee in Staf- 
ford — and not love I saak Walton ? A 
pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy an- 
gler, so let him huff away, and turn we 
to thee and to thy sweet charm in fish- 
ing for men. 

How often, studying in thy book, have 
I hummed, to myself that of Horace — 

Laudis amore tumes ? Sunt certa piacula qua te 
Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello. 

So healing a book for the frenzy of fame 



92 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

is thy discourse on meadows, and pure 
streams, and the country life. How 
peaceful, men say, and blessed must 
have been the life of this old man, how 
lapped in content, and hedged about by 
his own humility from the world ! They 
forget, who speak thus, that thy years, 
which were many, were also evil, or 
would have seemed evil to divers that 
had tasted of thy fortunes. Thou wert 
poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, 
for greed of money was thy detestation. 
Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age when 
gentle blood was alone held in regard ; 
yet thy virtues made thee hosts of friends, 
and chiefly among religious men, bish- 
ops, and doctors of the Church. Thy pri- 
vate life was not unacquainted with sor- 
row ; thy first wife and all her fair chil- 
dren were taken from thee like flowers 
in spring, though, in thine age, new love 
and new offspring comforted thee like 
'the primrose of the later year.' Thy 
private griefs might have made thee bit- 
ter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows 



ISAAK WALTON 93 

of the State and of the Church, which 
were deprived of their heads by cruel 
men, despoiled of their wealth, the pious 
driven, like thee, from their homes ; fear 
everywhere, everywhere robbery and 
confusion : all this ruin might have an- 
gered another temper. But thou, Fa- 
ther, didst bear all with so much sweet- 
ness as perhaps neither natural temper- 
ament, nor a firm faith, nor the love of 
angling could alone have displayed. For 
we see many anglers (as witness Richard 
Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, 
and myself, when I get my hooks entan- 
gled at every cast in a tree, have come 
nigh to swear prophane. 

Also we see religious men that are 
sour and fanatical, no rare thing in the 
party that professes godliness. But nei- 
ther private* sorrow nor public grief could 
abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a 
religion which was not untried, but had, 
indeed, passed through the furnace like 
fine gold. For if we find not Faith at 
all times easy, because of the oppositions 



94 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

of Science, and the searching curiosity 
of men's minds, neither was Faith a mat- 
ter of course in thy day. For the learned 
and pious were greatly tossed about, like 
worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by doubts wa- 
vering between the Church of Rome and 
the Reformed Church of England. The 
humbler folk, also, were invited, now 
here, now there, by the clamours of fa- 
natical Nonconformists, who gave them- 
selves out to be somebody, while Athe- 
ism itself was not without many to wit- 
ness to it. Therefore, such a religion as 
thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence 
of evil in the things of our Belief, but a 
reasonable and grounded faith, strong 
in despite of oppositions. Happy was 
the man in whom temper, and religion, 
and the love of the sweet country and 
an angler's pastime so conveniently com- 
bined ; happy the long life which held 
in its hand that threefold clue through 
the labyrinth of human fortunes ! Around 
thee Church and State might fall in 
ruins, and might be rebuilded, and thy 



ISAAK WALTON 95 

tears would not be bitter, nor thy tri- 
umph cruel. 
Thus, by God's blessing, it befell thee 

Nee turpem sencctam 
Degere, nee cithara carentem. 

I would, Father, that I could get at the 
verity about thy poems. Those recom- 
mendatory verses with which thou didst 
grace the Lives of Dr. Donne and others 
of thy friends, redound more to the praise 
of thy kind heart than thy fancy. But 
what or whose was the pastoral poem 
of 'Thealma and Clearchus,' which thou 
didst set about printing in 1678, and 
gavest to the world in 1683 ? Thou 
gavest John Chalkhill for the author's 
name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kin- 
dred died at Winchester, being eighty 
years of his age, in 1679. Now thou 
speakest of John Chalkhill as ' a friend 
of Edmund Spenser's,' and how could 
this be ? 

Are they right who hold that John 
Chalkhill was but a name of a friend, 
borrowed by thee out of modesty, and 



96 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

used as a cloak to cover poetry of thine 
own inditing ? When Mr. Flatman writes 
of Chalkhill, 't is in words well fitted to 
thine own merit : 

Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows 
Except. himself, who charitably shows 
The ready road to virtue and to praise, 
The road to many long and happy days. 

However it be, in that road, by quiet 
streams and through green pastures, 
thou didst walk all thine almost century 
of years, and we, who stray into thy 
path out of the highway of life, we seem 
to hold thy hand, and listen to thy cheer- 
ful voice. If our sport be worse, may 
our content be equal, and our praise, 
therefore, none the less. Father, if Mas- 
ter Stoddard, the great fisher of Tweed- 
side, be with thee, greet him for me, and 
thank him for those songs of his, and 
perchance he will troll thee a catch of 
our dear River. 

Tweed ! winding and wild ! where the heart is un- 
bound, 
They know not, they dream not, who linger around, 
How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin 
From thee — the bliss withered within. 



ISAAK WALTON 97 

Or perhaps thou wilt better love, 

The lanesome Tala and the Lyne, 

And Mahon wi' its mountain rills, 
An' Etterick, whose waters twine 

Wi' Yarrow frae the forest hills ; 
An' Gala, too, and Teviot bright, 

An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed, 
Their kindred valleys a' unite 

Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed ! 

So, Master, may you sing against each 
other, you two good old anglers, like 
Peter and Corydon, that sang in your 
golden age. 



X. 

To M. Chapelain. 

Monsieur, — You were a popular wri- 
ter, and an honourable, over - educated, 
upright gentleman. Of the latter char- 
acter you can never be deprived, and 
I doubt not it stands you in better 
stead where you are, than the laurels 
which flourished so gaily, and faded so 
soon. 

Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a 
day, 

But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel out- 
lives not May. 

I know not if Mr. Swinburne is cor- 
rect in his botany, but your laurel cer- 
tainly outlived not May, nor can we 
hope that you dwell where Orpheus and 
where Homer are. Some other crown, 
some other Paradise, we cannot doubt 
it, awaited un si bon homme. But the 



CHAPELAIN 99 

moral excellence that even Boileau ad- 
mitted, la foi, Vhonneur, la probite, do 
not in Parnassus avail the popular poet, 
and some luckless Musset or Theophile, 
Regnier or Villars attains a kind of im- 
mortality denied to the man of many 
contemporary editions, and of a great 
commercial ^success. 

If ever, for the confusion of Horace, 
any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should 
have been that fortunately manufactured 
article. You were, in matters of the 
Muses, the child of many prayers. 
Never, since Adam's day, have any par- 
ents but yours prayed for a poet-child. 
Then Destiny, that mocks the desires 
of men in general, and fathers in partic- 
ular, heard the appeal, and presented M. 
Chapelain and Jeanne Corbiere his wife 
with the future author of ' La Pucelle.' 
Oh futile hopes of men, O pectora cceca ! 
All was done that education could do for 
a genius which, among other qualities, 
'especially lacked fire and imagination/ 
and an ear for verse — sad defects these 



IOO LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

in a child of the Muses. Your training 
in all the mechanics and metaphysics of 
criticism might have made you exclaim, 
like Rasselas, ' Enough ! Thou hast 
convinced me that no human being can 
ever be a Poet.' Unhappily, you suc- 
ceeded in convincing Cardinal Riche- 
lieu that to be a Poet was well within 
your powers, you received a pension of 
one thousand crowns, and were made 
Captain of the Cardinal's minstrels, as 
M. de Treville was Captain of the King's 
Musketeers. 

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good 
intentions in poetry were more richly 
endowed than ever is Research, even 
Research in Prehistoric English, among 
us niggard moderns ! How I wish I 
knew a Cardinal, or, even as you did, a 
Prime Minister, who would praise and 
pension me ; but Envy be still ! Your 
existence was more happy indeed ; you 
constructed odes, corrected sonnets, pre- 
sided at the Hotel Rambouillet, while 
the learned ladies were still young and 



CHAPE LA IN 1 01 

fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious ce- 
lebrity on the score of your yet unpub- 
lished Epic. ' Who, indeed/ says a sym- 
pathetic author, M. Theophile Gautier, 
'who could expect less than a miracle 
from a man so deeply learned in the 
laws of art — a perfect Turk in the sci- 
ence of poetry, a person so well pen- 
sioned, and so favoured by the great ? ' 
Bishops and politicians combined in per- 
fect good faith to advertise your merits. 
Hard must have been the heart that 
could resist the testimonials of your skill 
as a poet offered by the Due de Mon- 
tausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of 
Avranches, and Monseigneur Godeau, 
Bishop of Vence, or M. Colbert, who 
had such a genius for finance. 

If bishops and politicians and prime 
ministers skilled in finance, and some 
critics, Menage and Sarrazin and Vau- 
getas, if ladies of birth and taste, if all 
the world in fact, combined to tell you 
that you were a great poet, how can we 
blame you for taking yourself seriously, 



102 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and appraising yourself at the public 
estimate ? 

It was not in human nature to resist 
the evidence of the bishops especially, 
and when every minor poet believes in 
himself on the testimony of his own con- 
ceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if 
you listened to the plaudits of your 
friends. Nay, you ventured to pro- 
nounce judgment on contemporaries 
whom Posterity has preferred to your 
perfections. ' Moliere,' said you, ' un- 
derstands the nature of comedy, and 
presents it in a natural style. The.4>lot 
of his best pieces is borrowed, but not 
without judgment ; his morale is fair, 
and he has only to avoid scurrility.' 

Excellent, unconscious, popular Cha- 
pelain ! 

Of yourself you observed, in a Report 
on contemporary literature, that your 
'courage and sincerity never allowed 
you to tolerate work not absolutely 
good.' And yet you regarded ■ La Pu- 
celle ' with some complacency. 



CHAPELAW IO3 

On the 'Pucelle' you were occupied 
during a generation of mortal men. I 
marvel not at the length of your labours, 
as you received a yearly pension till the 
Epic was finished, but your Muse was no 
Alcmena, and no Hercules was the re- 
sult of that prolonged night of creations. 
First you gravely wrote out (it was the 
task of five years) all the compositions in 
prose. Ah, why did you not leave it in 
that commonplace but appropriate me- 
dium ? What says the Precieuse about 
you in Boileau's satire ? 

In Chapelain, for all his foes have said, 

She finds but one defect, he can't be read ; 

Yet thinks the world might taste his maiden's woes, 

If only he would turn his verse to prose ! 

The verse had been prose, and prose, 
perhaps, it should have remained. Yet 
for this precious ' Pucelle,' in the age 
when ' Paradise Lost ' was sold for five 
pounds, you are believed to have re- 
ceived about four thousand. Horace was 
wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now 
and then), and he was a wise man who 



104 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

first spoke of aurea mediocritas. At 
length the great work was achieved, a 
work thrice blessed in its theme, that 
divine Maiden to whom France owes all, 
and whom you and Voltaire have recom- 
pensed so strangely. In folio, in italics, 
with a score of portraits and engravings, 
and culs de lampe, the great work was 
given to the world, and had a success. 
Six editions in eighteen months are fig- 
ures which fill the poetic heart with envy 
and admiration. And then, alas ! the 
bubble burst. A great lady, Madame de 
Longveille, hearing the ' Pucelle ' read 
aloud, murmured that it was ' perfect 
indeed, but perfectly wearisome.' Then 
the satires began, and the satirists never 
left you till your poetic reputation was a 
rag, till the mildest Abbe at Menage's 
had his cheap sneer for Chapelain. 

I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and 
jealousy had much to do with the on- 
slaught on your ' Pucelle.' These quali- 
ties, alas ! are not strange to literary 
minds ; does not even Hesiod tell us 



CHAP EL A IN 105 

that ' potter hates potter, and poet hates 
poet ' ? But contemporary spites do not 
harm true genius. Who suffered more 
than Moliere from cabals ? Yet neither 
the court nor the town ever deserted 
him, and he is still the joy of the world. 
I admit that his adversaries were weaker 
than yours. What were Boursault and 
Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and 
De Vise, what were they all compared 
to your enemy, Boileau ? Brossette tells 
a story which really makes a man pity 
you. There was a M. de Puimorin who, 
to be in the fashion, laughed at your 
once popular Epic. * It is all very well 
for a man to laugh who cannot even 
read.' Whereon M. de Puimorin replied : 
'Qu'il n'avoit que trop su lire, depuis 
que Chapelain s'etoit avise de faire im- 
primer.' A new horror had been added 
to the accomplishment of reading since 
Chapelain had published. This repar- 
tee was applauded, and M. de Puimorin 
tried to turn it into an epigram. He did 
complete the last couplet, 



106 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Helas ! pour mes peches, je n'ai su que trop lire 
Depuis que tu fais imprimer. 

Eut by no labour would M. de Pui- 
morin achieve the first two lines of his 
epigram. Then you remember what 
great allies came to his assistance. I 
almost blush to think that M. Despreaux, 
M. Racine, and M. de Moliere, the three 
most renowned wits of the time, con- 
spired to complete the poor jest, and 
madden you. Well, bubble as your 
poetry was, you may be proud that it 
needed all these sharpest of pens to 
prick the bubble. Other poets, as pop- 
ular as you, have been annihilated by an 
article. Macaulay puts forth his hand, 
and ' Satan Montgomery ' was no more. 
It did not need a Macaulay, the laughter 
of a mob of little critics was enough to 
blow into space ; but you probably have 
met Montgomery, and of contemporary 
failures or successes I do not speak. 

I wonder, sometimes, wiiether the con- 
sensus of criticism ever made you doubt 
for a moment whether, after all, you 



CHAPE LA IN 107 

were not a false child of Apollo ? Was 
your complacency tortured, as the com- 
placency of true poets has occasionally 
been, by doubts ? Did you expect pos- 
terity to reverse the verdict of the satir- 
ists, and to do you justice ? You an- 
swered your earliest assailant, Liniere, 
and, by a few changes of words, turned 
his epigrams into flattery. But I fancy, 
on the whole, you remained calm, un- 
moved, wrapped up in admiration of 
yourself. According to M. de Marivaux, 
who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits 
of the mighty dead, you ' conceived, on 
the strength of your reputation, a great 
and serious veneration for yourself and 
your genius.' Probably you were pro- 
tected by this invulnerable armour of an 
honest vanity, probably you declared 
that mere jealousy dictates the lines of 
Boileau, and that Chapelain's real fault 
was his popularity, and his pecuniary 
success, 

Qu'il soit le mieux rente de tous les beaux-esprits. 

This, you would avow, was your of- 



108 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

fence, and perhaps you were not alto- 
gether mistaken. Yet posterity declines 
to read a line of yours, and, as we think 
of you, we are again set face to face with 
that eternal problem, how far is popular- 
ity a test of poetry ? Burns was a poet, 
and popular. Byron was a popular poet, 
and the world agrees in the verdict of 
their own generation. But Montgomery, 
though he sold so well, was no poet, nor, 
Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the 
stuff of immortality. Criticism cannot 
hurt what is truly great ; the Cardinal 
and the Academy left Chimene as fair 
as ever, and as adorable. It is only 
pinchbeck that perishes under the acids 
of satire : gold defies them. Yet I some- 
times ask myself, does the existence of 
popularity like yours justify the malig- 
nity of satire, which blesses neither him 
who gives, nor him who takes ? Are 
poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet ? 
I doubt it, Sir, holding that, even un- 
packed, a poetic bubble must soon burst 
by its own nature. Yet satire will as- 



CHAPELAIN 



109 



suredly be written so long as bad poets 
are successful, and bad poets will assur- 
edly reflect that their assailants are 
merely envious, and, while their vogue 
lasts, that Prime Ministers and the pur- 
chasing public are the only judges. 
Monsieur, 
Votre tres humble serviteur, 

Andrew Lang. 



XL 

To Sir yohn Ma7mdeville, Kt. 

(of the ways into ynde.) 

Sir John, — Wit you well that men 
holden you but light, and some clepen 
you a Liar. And they say that you 
never were born in Englond, in the town 
of Seynt Albones, nor have seen and 
gone through manye diverse Londes. 
And there goeth an old knight at arms, 
and one that connes Latyn, and hath 
been beyond the sea, and hath seen 
Prester John's country. And he hath 
been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, 
and there bin women bearded. Now 
men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and 
he hath writ of thee in his great booke, 
Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly. 
For he saith that ye did pill your tales 
out of Odoric his book, and that ye never 



SIR JOHN MANNDEV1LLE III 

saw snails with shells as big as houses, 
nor never met no Devyls, but part of 
that ye say, ye took it out of William of 
Boldensele his book, yet ye took not his 
wisdom, withal, but put in thine own 
foolishness. Nevertheless, Sir John, for 
the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a 
good fellow, and a merry ; so now, come, 
I shall tell you of the new ways into 
Ynde. 

In that Lond they have a Queen that 
governeth all the Lond, and all they ben 
obeyssant to her. And she is the Queen 
of Englond ; for Englishmen have taken 
all the Lond of Ynde. For they were 
right good werryoures of old, and wyse, 
noble, and worthy. But of late hath 
risen a new sort of Englishman very 
puny and fearful, and these men clepen 
Radicals. And they go ever in fear, and 
they scream on high for dread in the 
streets and the houses, and they fain 
would flee away from all that their fathers 
gat them with the sword. And this sort 
men call Scuttleres, but the mean folk 



112 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and certain of the womenkind hear them 
gladly, and they say ever that English- 
men should flee out of Ynde. 

Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by 
many dyverse Contreyes. For English- 
men ben very stirring and nymble. For 
they ben in the seventh climate, that is 
of the Moon. And the Moon (ye have 
said it yourself, Sir John, natheless, is it 
true) is of lightly moving, for to go di- 
verse ways, and see strange things, and 
other diversities of the Worlde. Where- 
fore Englishmen be lightly moving, and 
far wandering. And they gon to Ynde 
by the great Sea Ocean. First come 
they to Gibraltar, that was the point of 
Spain, and builded upon a rock ; and 
there ben apes, and it is so strong that 
no man may take it. Natheless did 
Englishmen take it fro the Spanyard, 
and all to hold the way to Ynde. For 
ye may sail all about Africa, and past 
the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, 
but that way unto Ynde is long and the 
sea is weary. Wherefore men rather go 



SIR JOHN MANNDE VILLE 1 1 3 

by the Midland sea. and Englishmen 
have taken many Yles in that sea. 

For first they have taken an Yle that 
is clept Malta ; and therein built they 
great castles, to hold it against them of 
Fraunce, and Italy, and of Spain. And 
from this He of Malta Men gon to Cipre. 
And Cipre is right a good Yle, and a 
fair, and a great, and it hath 4 principal 
Cytees within him. And at Famagost 
is one of the principal Havens of the 
sea that is in the world, and Englishmen 
have but a lytel while gone won that 
Yle from the Sarazynes. Yet say that 
sort of Englishmen where of I told you, 
that is puny and sore adread, that the 
Lond is poisonous and barren and of no 
avail, for that Lond is much more hotter 
than it is here. Yet the Englishmen 
that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, 
and the skill is that they may ben the 
more fresh. 

From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond 
of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night 
he that hath a good wind may come 
8 



114 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

to the Haven of Alessandrie. Now the 
Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, 
yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond 
of Egypt. And when I say this, I do 
jape with words, and may hap ye under- 
stand me not. Now Englishmen went 
in shippes to Alessandrie, and brent it, 
and. over ran the Lond, and their soud- 
yours warred agen the Bedoynes, and 
all to hold the way to Ynde. For it is 
not long past since Frenchmen let dig a 
dyke, through the narrow spit of lond, 
from the Midland sea to the Red sea, 
wherein was Pharaoh drowned. So this 
is the shortest way to Ynde there may 
be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon 
by sea. 

But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen 
the Vale enchaunted ; for no man may 
do his business well that goes thither, 
but always fares he evil, and therefore 
clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, 
and the sepulchre of reputations. And 
men say there that is one of the entrees 
of Helle. In that Vale is plentiful lack 



SIR JOHN MANNDEVILLE 115 

of Gold and Silver, for many misbeliev- 
ing men, and many Christian men also, 
have gone often time for to take of the 
Thresoure that there was of old, and 
have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore 
there is none left. And Englishmen 
have let carry thither great store of our 
Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, 
and whether they will see it agen I mis- 
doubt me. For that Vale is alle fulle of 
Develes and Fiendes that men clepen 
Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde 
is the Lond of Bondage. And whatso- 
ever Thresoure cometh into the Lond, 
these Devyls of Bondholders grabben 
the same. Natheless by that Vale do 
Englishmen go unto Ynde, and they gon 
by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the 
mouth of the Flood of Ynde. Thereby 
they send their souldyours, when they 
are adread of them of Muscovy. 

For, look you, there is another way 
into Ynde, and thereby the men of Mus- 
covy are fain to come, if the Englishmen 
let them not. That way cometh by De- 



Il6 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

sert and Wildernesse, from the sea that 
is clept Caspian, even to Khiva, and so 
to Merv ; and then come ye to Zulfikar 
and Perfjdeh, and anon to Herat, that 
is called the Key of the Gates of Ynde. 
Then ye win the lond of the' Emir of the 
Afghauns, a great prince and a rich, and 
he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, 
and stars, and coats that captains wearen, 
than any other man on earth. 

For all they of Muscovy, and all Eng- 
lishmen maken him gifts, and he keep- 
eth the gifts, and he keepeth his own 
counsel. For his lond lieth between 
Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, where- 
fore both Englishmen and men of Mus- 
covy would fain have him friendly, yea, 
and independent. Wherefore they of both 
parties give him clocks, and watches, and 
stars, and crosses, and culverins, and 
now and again they let cut the throats 
of his men some deal, and pill his coun- 
try. Thereby they both set up their 
rest that the Emir will be independent, 
yea, and friendly. But his men love him 



SIR JOHN MANNDEVILLE WJ 

not, neither love they the English, nor 
the Muscovy folk, for they are worship- 
pers of Mahound, and endure not Chris- 
tian men. And they love not them that 
cut their throats, and burn their coun- 
try. 

Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, 
and they ben subtle for to make a thing 
seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive 
mankind. Wherefore Englishmen put- 
ten no trust in them of Muscovy, save 
only the Englishmen clept Radicals, for 
they make as if they loved these Dev- 
eles, out of the fear and dread of war 
wherein they go, and would be slaves 
sooner than fight. But the folk of Ynde 
know not what shall befall, nor whether 
they of Muscovy will take the Lond, or 
Englishmen shall keep it, so that their 
hearts may not enduren for drede. And 
methinks that soon shall Englishmen 
and Muscovy folk put their bodies in 
adventure, and war one with another, 
and all for the way to Ynde. 

But St. George for Englond, I say, 



Il8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 



and so enough ; and may the Seyntes 
hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Arte- 
tykes, that thee tormenten. But to thy 
Boke I list not to give no credence. 



XII. 

To Alexandre Dumas. 

Sir, — There are moments when the 
wheels of life, even of such a life as 
yours, run slow, and when mistrust and 
doubt overshadow even the most intrepid 
disposition. In such a moment, towards 
the ending of your days, you said to 
your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, ' I seem 
to see myself set on a pedestal which 
trembles as if it were founded on the 
sands.' These sands, your uncounted 
volumes, are all of gold, and make a 
foundation more solid than - the rock. 
As well might the singer of Odysseus, 
or the authors of the ' Arabian Nights ' 
or the first inventors of the stories of 
Boccaccio, believe that their works were 
perishable (their names, indeed, have 
perished), as the creator of * Les Trois 



120 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Mousquetaires ' alarm himself with the 
thought that the world could ever forget 
Alexandre Dumas. 

Than yours there has been no greater 
nor more kindly and beneficent force in 
modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you 
owed the first impulse of your genius ; 
but, once set in motion, what miracles 
could it not accomplish ? Our dear 
Porthos was overcome, at last, by a su- 
perhuman burden ; but your imagina- 
tive strength never found a task too 
great for it. What an extraordinary 
vigour, what health, what an overflow of 
force was yours ! It is good, in a day 
of small and laborious ingenuities, to 
breathe the free air of your books, and 
dwell in the company of Dumas's men 
— so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, 
such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. 
Like M. de Rochefort in ' Vingt Ans 
Apres,' like that prisoner of the Bastille, 
your genius ' n'est que d'un parti, c'est 
du parti du grand air.' 

There seems to radiate from you a 



ALEXANDRE DUMAS 121 

still persistent energy and enjoyment ; 
in that current of strength not only your 
characters live, frolic, kindly, and sane, 
but even your very collaborators were 
animated by the virtue which went out 
of you. How else can we explain it, 
the dreary charge which feeble and en- 
vious tongues have brought against you, 
in England and at home ? They say 
you employed in your novels and dramas 
that vicarious aid which, in the slang of 
the studio, the ' sculptor's ghost ' is fa- 
bled to afford. 

Well, let it be so ; these ghosts, when 
uninspired by you, were faint and impo- 
tent as ' the strengthless tribes of the 
dead' in Homer's Hades, before Odys- 
seus had poured forth the blood that 
gave them a momentary valour. It was 
from you and your inexhaustible vitality 
that these collaborating spectres drew 
what life they possessed ; and when 
they parted from you they shuddered 
back into their nothingness. Where are 
the plays, where the romances which 



122 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Maquet and the rest wrote in their own 
strength ? They are forgotten with last 
year's snows ; they have passed into the 
wide waste -paper basket of the world. 
You say of D'Artagnan, when severed 
from his three friends — from Porthos, 
Athos, and Aramis — 'he felt that he 
could do nothing, save on the condition 
that each of these companions yielded 
to him, if one may so speak, a share of 
that electric fluid which was his gift 
from heaven.' 

No man of letters ever had so great 
a measure of that gift as you ; none 
gave of it more freely to all who came 
— to the chance associate of the hour, 
as to the characters, all so burly and 
full - blooded, who flocked from your 
brain. Thus it was that you failed when 
you approached the supernatural. Your 
ghosts had too much flesh and blood, 
more than the living persons of feebler 
fancies. A writer so fertile, so rapid, 
so masterly in the ease with which he 
worked, could not escape the reproaches 



ALEXANDRE DUMAS 1 23 

of barren envy. Because you overflowed 
with wit, you could not be ' serious ; ' 
because you created with a word, you 
were said to scamp your work ; because 
you were never dull, never pedantic, in- 
capable of greed, you were to be cen- 
sured as desultory, inaccurate, and prod- 
igal. 

A generation suffering from mental 
and physical anaemia — a generation de- 
voted to the ' chiselled phrase,' to accu- 
mulated 'documents,' to microscopic por- 
ings over human baseness, to minute 
and disgustful records of what in hu- 
manity is least human — may readily 
bring these unregarded and railing ac- 
cusations. Like one of the great and 
good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you 
may hear the murmurs from afar, and 
smile with disdain. To you, who can 
amuse the world — to you who offer it 
the fresh air of the highway, the battle- 
field, and the sea — the world must al- 
ways return : escaping gladly from the 
boudoirs and the bouges, from the sur- 



124 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

geries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of 
M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the wea- 
risome De Goncourt. 

With all your frankness, and with 
that queer morality of the Camp which, 
if it swallows a camel now and again, 
never strains at a gnat, how healthy and 
wholesome, and even pure, are your ro- 
mances ! You never gloat over sin, nor 
dabble with an ugly curiosity in the cor- 
ruptions of sense. The passions in your 
tales are honourable and brave, the mo- 
tives are clearly human. Honour, Love, 
Friendship make the threefold cord, the 
clue your knights and dames follow 
through how delightful a labyrinth of 
adventures ! Your greatest books, I 
take the liberty to maintain, are the 
Cycle of the Valois (' La Reine Margot,' 
' La Dame de Montsoreau,' ' Les Oua- 
rante-cinq '), and the Cycle of Louis 
Treize and Louis Quatorze (' Les Trois 
Mousquetaires,' ■ Vingt Ans Apres,' ■ Le 
Vicomte de Bragelonne ') ; and, beside 
these two trilogies — a lonely monument, 



ALEXANDRE DUMAS 1 25 

like the sphinx hard by the three pyra- 
mids — ' Monte Cristo.' 

In these romances how easy it would 
have been for you to burn incense to 
that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our 
critic says your people worship. You 
had Brantome, you had Tallemant, you 
had Retif, and a dozen others, to furnish 
materials for scenes of voluptuousness 
and of blood that would have outdone 
even the present naturalistes. From 
these alcoves of ' Les Dames Galantes,' 
and from the torture chambers (M. Zola 
would not have spared us one starting 
sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) 
you turned, as Scott would have turned, 
without a thought of their profitable lit- 
erary uses. You had other metal to work 
on : you gave us that superstitious and 
tragical true love of La Mole's, that de- 
votion — how tender and how pure ! — 
of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. 
You gave us the valour of D'Artagnan, 
the strength of Porthos, the melancholy 
nobility of Athos : Honour, Chivalry, 



126 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and Friendship. I declare your charac- 
ters are real people to me and old friends. 
I cannot bear to read the end of ' Brage- 
lonne,' and to part with them for ever. 
1 Suppose Porthos, Athos, and Aramis 
should enter with a noiseless swagger, 
curling their moustaches.' How we would 
welcome them, forgiving D'Artagnan 
even his hateful foiwberie in the case of 
Milady. The brilliance of your dialogue 
has never been approached : there is wit 
everywhere ; repartees glitter and ring 
like the flash and clink of small-swords. 
Then what duels are yours ! and what 
inimitable battle-pieces ! I know four 
good fights of one against a multitude, 
in literature. These are the Death of 
Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar 
of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the 
Wake, the Death of Bussy d'Amboise. 
We can compare the strokes of the he- 
roic fighting-times with those described 
in later days ; and, upon my word, I do 
not know that the short sword of Gretir, 
or the bill of Skarphedin, or the bow of 



ALEXANDRE DUMAS 127 

Gunnar was better wielded than the ra- 
pier of your Bussy or the sword and 
shield of Kingsley's Hereward. 

They say your fencing is unhistorical ; 
no doubt it is so, and you knew it. La 
Mole could not have lunged on Cocon- 
nas 'after deceiving circle ;' for the parry 
was not invented except by your immor- 
tal Chicot, a genius in advance of his 
time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes 
would have fought with shields and axes, 
not with small swords. But what mat- 
ters this pedantry ? In your works we 
hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing 
in the clash of steel ; and even, at times, 
your very phrases are unconsciously Ho- 
meric. 

Look at these men of murder, on the 
Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in ter- 
ror from the Queen's chamber, and 'find 
the door too narrow for their flight:' the 
very words were anticipated in a line of 
the 'Odyssey' concerning the massacre 
of the Wooers. And the picture of 
Catherine de Medicis, prowling 'like a 



128 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

wolf among the bodies and the blood,' in 
a passage of the Louvre — the picture 
is taken unwittingly from the ' Iliad.' 
There was in you that reserve of primi- 
tive force, that epic grandeur and sim- 
plicity of diction. This is the force that 
animates ' Monte Cristo,' the earlier 
chapters, the prison, and the escape. In 
later volumes of that romance, methinks, 
you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I 
have little room, and less skill, to speak. 
1 Antony,' they tell me, was 'the great- 
est literary event of its time,' 'was a 
restoration of the stage. ' While Vic- 
tor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of 
history, the wardrobe and costume, the 
sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of 
Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Bor- 
gia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more 
than a room in an inn, where people 
meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul 
with the last degree of terror and of 
pity.' 

The reproach of being amusing has 
somewhat dimmed your fame — for a 



ALEXANDRE DUMAS 1 29 

moment. The shadow of this tyranny 
will soon be overpast ; and when ' La 
Curee ' and ' Pot-Bouille ' are more for- 
gotten than ' Le Grand Cyrus,' men and 
women — and, above all, boys — will 
laugh and weep over the page of Alex- 
andre Dumas. Like Scott himself, you 
take us captive in our childhood. I re- 
member a very idle little boy who was 
busy with the 'Three Musketeers' when 
he should have been occupied with 'Wil- 
kins's Latin Prose.' ' Twenty years 
after* (alas and more) he is still constant 
to that gallant company ; and, at this 
very moment, is breathlessly wondering 
whether Grimaud will steal M. de Beau- 
fort out of the Cardinal's prison. 
9 



XIII. 

To Theocritus. 

f Sweet, methinks, is the whispering 
sound of yonder pine-tree,' so, Theocri- 
tus, with that sweet word aBv, didst thou 
begin and strike the keynote of thy 
songs. ' Sweet,' and didst thou find 
aught of sweet, when thou, like thy 
Daphnis, didst ' go down the stream, 
when the whirling wave closed over the 
man the Muses loved, the man not hated 
of the Nymphs ? ' Perchance below 
those waters of death thou didst find, 
like thine own Hylas, the lovely Nereids 
waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis, and 
Nycheia with her April eyes. In the 
House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there 
dwell aught that is fair, and can the low 
light on the fields of asphodel make thee 
forget thy Sicily ? Nay, methinks thou 



THEOCRITUS 13 1 

hast not forgotten, and perchance for po- 
ets dead there is prepared a place more 
beautiful than their dreams. It was well 
for the later minstrels of another day, it 
was well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to 
desire a dim Elysium of their own, where 
the sunlight comes faintly through the 
shadow of the earth, where the poplars 
are duskier, and the waters more pale 
than in the meadows of Anjou. 

There, in that restful twilight, far re- 
mote from war and plot, from sword and 
fire, and from religions that sharpened 
the steel and lit the torch, there these 
learned singers would fain have wan- 
dered with their learned ladies, satiated 
with life and in love with an unearthly 
quiet. But to thee, Theocritus, no twi- 
light of the Hollow Land was dear, but 
the high suns of Sicily and the brown 
cheeks of the country maidens were 
happiness enough. For thee, therefore, 
methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium 
beneath the summer of a far-off system, 
with stars not ours and alien seasons. 



132 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the 
thrice desirable, be with thee the whole 
year through, where there is neither 
frost, nor is the heat so heavy on men, 
but all is fruitful, and all sweet things 
blossom, and evenly meted are darkness 
and dawn. Space is wide, and there be 
many worlds, and suns enow, and the 
Sun-god surely has had a care of his 
own. Little didst thou need, in thy na- 
tive land, the isle of the three capes, lit- 
tle didst thou need but sunlight on land 
and sea. Death can have shown thee 
naught dearer than the fragrant shadow 
of the pines, where the dry needles of 
the fir are strewn, or glades where feath- 
ered ferns make ' a couch more soft 
than Sleep.' The short grass of the 
cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou 
wouldst lie, and watch, with the tunny 
watcher till the deep blue sea was 
broken by the burnished sides of the 
tunny shoal, and afoam with their gam- 
bols in the brine. There the Muses met 
thee, and the Nymphs, and there Apollo, 



THEOCRITUS 1 33 

remembering his old thraldom with Ad- 
metus, would lead once more a mortal's 
flocks, and listen and learn, Theocritus, 
while thou, like thine own Comatas, 
* didst sweetly sing.' 

There, methinks, I see thee as in thy 
happy days, ' reclined on deep beds of 
fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and re- 
joicing in new stript leaves of the vine, 
while far above thy head waved many a 
poplar, many an elm-tree, and close at 
hand the sacred waters sang frotn the 
mouth of the cavern of the nymphs/ 
And when night came, methinks thou 
wouldst flee from the merry company 
and the dancing girls, from the fading 
crowns of roses or white violets, from 
the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and the 
Bibline wine, from these thou wouldst 
slip away into the summer night. Then 
the beauty of life and of the summer 
would keep thee from thy couch, and 
wandering away from Syracuse by the 
sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst 
watch the low cabin, roofed with grass, 



134 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

where the fishing-rods of reed were lean- 
ing against the door, while the Mediter- 
ranean floated up her waves, and filled 
the waste with sound. There didst thou 
see thine ancient fishermen rising ere 
the dawn from their bed of dry sea- 
weed, and heardst them stirring, drowsy, 
among their fishing gear, and heardst 
them tell their dreams. 

Or again thou wouldst wander with 
dusty feet through the ways that the 
dust makes silent, while the breath of 
the kine, as they were driven forth with 
the morning, came fresh to thee, and 
the trailing dewy branch of honeysuckle 
struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou 
wouldst see the Dawn awake in rose 
and saffron across the waters, and Etna, 
grey and pale against the sky, and the 
setting crescent would dip strangely in 
the glow, on her way to the sea. Then, 
methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like 
thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, 
' Farewell, Selene, bright and fair ; fare- 
well, ye other stars, that follow the 



THEOCRITUS 1 35 

wheels of the quiet Night/ Nay, surely 
it was in such an hour that thou didst 
behold the girl as she burned the laurel 
leaves and the barley grain, and melted 
the waxen image, and called on Selene 
to bring her lover home. Even so, even 
now, in the islands of Greece, the set- 
ting Moon may listen to the prayers of 
maidens. ' Bright golden Moon, that 
now art near the waters, go thou and 
salute my lover, he that stole my love, 
and that kissed me, saying " Never will 
I leave thee." And lo, he hath left me 
as men leave a field reaped and gleaned, 
like a church where none cometh to 
pray, like a city desolate.' 

So the girls still sing in Greece, for 
though the Temples have fallen, and the 
wandering shepherds sleep beneath the 
broken columns of the god's house in 
Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still 
to the old divinities in the shrines of the 
hearths of the peasants. It is none of 
the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of 
the Sicilian shepherds of our time, ' Ah, 



136 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send 
thee, what offering to the other world ? 
The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, 
and one by one they perish, the petals 
of the rose. I will send thee my tears 
shed on a napkin, and what though it 
burneth in the flame, if my tears reach 
thee at the last.' 

Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on 
thes,e shores beneath the sun, where 
thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped 
from the roughest of he-goats, and about 
thy breast an old cloak buckled with a 
plaited belt. Thou wert happier there, 
in Sicily, methinks, and among vines 
and shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in 
the dust, and heat, and noise of Alex- 
andria. What love of fame, what lust of 
gold tempted thee away from the red 
cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black 
water wreathed with maidenhair ? 

The music of thy rustic flute 
Kept not for long its happy country tone ; 

Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note 
Of men contention tost, of men who groan, 



THEOCRITUS 1 37 

Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy 
throat — 
It failed, and thou wast mute ! 

What hadst thou to make in cities, 
and what could Ptolemies and Princes 
give thee better than the goat -milk 
cheese and the Ptelean wine ? Thy 
Muses were meant to be the delight of 
peaceful men, not of tyrants and wealthy 
merchants, to whom they vainly went on 
a begging errand. 'Who will open his 
door and gladly receive our Muses within 
his house, who is there that will not 
send them back again without a gift? 
And they with naked feet and looks 
askance come homewards, and sorely 
they upbraid me when they have gone 
on a vain journey, and listless again in 
the bottom of their empty coffer they 
dwell with heads bowed over their chilly 
knees, where is their drear abode, when 
portionless they return.' How far hap- 
pier was the prisoned goat-herd, Coma- 
tas, in the fragrant cedar chest where 
the blunt-faced bees from the meadow 



I38 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

fed him with food of tender flowers, be- 
cause still the Muse dropped sweet 
nectar on his lips ! 

Thou didst leave the neat-herds and 
the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the 
galingale hummed over by the bees, and 
the pine that dropped her cones, and 
Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca 
with her feet of carven ivory. Thou 
soughtest the City, and strife with other 
singers, and the learned write still on 
thy quarrels with Apollonius and Calli- 
machus, and Antagoras of Rhodes. So 
ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy, 
jealousy, and all unkindness. 

Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou 
teach thy rural song, though all these 
centuries, more than two thousand years, 
they have laboured to vie with thee. 
There has come no new pastoral poet, 
though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and 
Phillips, and all the buckram band of the 
teacup time ; and all the modish swains 
of France have sung against thee, as 
the son cliallenged Athene. They never 



THEOCRITUS 1 39 

knew the shepherd's life, the long winter 
nights on dried heather by the fire, the 
long summer days, when over the dry 
grass all is quiet, and only the insects 
hum, and the shrunken burn whispers 
a silver tune. Swains in high - heeled 
shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in rouge 
and diamonds, the world is weary of all 
concerning them, save their images in 
porcelain, effigies how unlike the golden 
figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bom- 
byca and Battus. Somewhat, Theocritus, 
thou hast to answer for, thou that first 
of men brought the shepherd to Court, 
and made courtiers wild to go a Maying 
with the shepherds. 



XIV. 

To Edgar Allan Poe. 

Sir, — Your English readers, better 
acquainted with your poems and ro- 
mances than with your criticisms, have 
long wondered at the indefatigable ha- 
tred which pursues your memory. You, 
who knew the men, will not marvel that 
certain microbes of letters, the survivors 
of your own generation, still harass your 
name with their malevolence, while old 
women twitter out their incredible and 
heeded slanders in the literary papers 
of New York. But their persistent ani- 
mosity does not quite suffice to explain 
the dislike with which many American 
critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps 
the greatest literary genius, of their 
country. With a commendable patriot- 
ism, they are not apt to rate native 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE 141 

merit too low ; and you, I think, are the 
only example of an American prophet 
almost without honour in his own coun- 
try. 

The recent publication of a cold, care- 
ful, and in many respects admirable 
study of your career (' Edgar Allan Poe,' 
by George Woodberry : Houghton, Mif- 
flin and Co., Boston) reminds English 
readers who have forgotten it, and 
teaches those who never knew it, that 
you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer. 
How unhappy were the necessities, how 
deplorable the vein, that compelled or 
seduced a man of your eminence into 
the dusty and stony ways of contempo- 
rary criticism ! About the writers of his 
own generation a leader of that genera- 
tion should hold his peace. He should 
neither praise nor blame nor defend his 
equals ; he should not strike one blow 
at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The 
breath of their life is in the columns of 
1 Literary Gossip ; ' and they should be 
allowed to perish with the weekly adver- 



142 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

tisements on which they pasture. Re- 
viewing, of course, there must needs be ; 
but great minds should only criticise the 
great who have passed beyond the reach 
of eulogy or fault-finding. 

Unhappily, taste and circumstances 
combined to make you a censor ; you 
vexed a continent, and you are still un- 
forgiven. What ' irritation of a sensi- 
tive nature, chafed by some indefinite 
sense of wrong,' drove you (in Mr. Long- 
fellow's own words) to attack his pure 
and beneficent Muse we may never as- 
certain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave 
you easily ; for pardon comes easily to 
the great. It was the smaller men, the 
Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that 
knew not how to forget. ' The New 
Yorkers never forgave him,' says your 
latest biographer ; and one scarcely mar- 
vels at the inveteracy of their malice. 
It was not individual vanity alone, but 
the whole literary class that you assailed. 
'As a literary people,' you wrote, 'we 
are one vast perambulating humbug.' 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 143 

After that declaration of war you died, 
and left your reputation to the vanities 
yet writhing beneath your scorn. They 
are writhing and writing still. He who 
knows them need not linger over the 
attacks and defences of your personal 
character ; he will not waste time on 
calumnies, tale - bearing, private letters, 
and all the noisome dust which takes so 
long in settling above your tomb. 

For us it is enough to know that you 
were compelled to live by your pen, 
and that in an age when the author of 
1 To Helen ' and ' The Cask of Amontil- 
lado ' was paid at the rate of a dollar a 
column. When such poverty was the 
mate of such pride as yours, a misery 
more deep than that of Burns, an agony 
longer than Chatterton's, were inevitable 
and assured. No man was less fortunate 
than you in the moment of his birth — 
infelix opportunitate vita. Had you lived 
a generation later, honour, wealth, ap- 
plause, success in Europe and at home, 
would all have been yours. Within 



144 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

thirty years so great a change has passed 
over the profession of letters in America ; 
and it is impossible to estimate the re- 
wards which would have fallen to Edgar 
Poe, had chance made him the contem- 
porary of Mark Twain and of 'Called 
Back.' It may be that your criticisms 
helped to bring in the new era, and to 
lift letters out of the reach of quite un- 
lettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, 
at least you had a respect for scholar- 
ship. You might still marvel over such 
words as 'objectional ' in the new biog- 
raphy of yourself, and might ask what is 
meant by such a sentence as ' his con- 
nection with it had inured to his own 
benefit by the frequent puffs of himself,' 
and so forth. 

Best known in your own day as a 
critic, it is as a poet and a writer of 
short tales that you must live. But to 
discuss your few and elaborate poems 
is a waste of time, so completely does 
your own brief definition of poetry, ' the 
rhythmic creation of the beautiful,' ex- 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE I45 

haust your theory, and so perfectly is 
the theory illustrated by the poems. 
Natural bent, and reaction against the 
example of Mr. Longfellow, combined 
to make you too intolerant of what you 
call the ' didactic ' element in verse. 
Even if morality be not seven-eighths 
of our life (the exact proportion as at 
present estimated), there was a place 
even on the Hellenic Parnassus for 
gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature 
of the case must always be the largest 
public. 

' Music is the perfection of the soul 
or the idea of poetry,' so you wrote ; 
' the vagueness of exaltation aroused by 
a sweet air (which should be indefinite 
and never too strongly suggestive), is 
precisely what we should aim at in po- 
etry.' You aimed at that mark, and 
struck it again and again, notably in 
' Helen, thy beauty is to me,' in 'The 
Haunted Palace,' * The Valley of Unrest,' 
and * The City in the Sea.' But by some 
Nemesis which might, perhaps, have 



I46 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

been foreseen, you are, to the world, the 
poet of one poem — ' The Raven : ' a 
piece in which the music is highly arti- 
ficial, and the ' exaltation ' (what there is 
of it) by no means particularly ' vague.' 
So a portion of the public know little of 
Shelley but the ' Skylark,' and those two 
incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, 
bear each of them a poet's name vivii 
per ora virum. Your theory of poetry, 
if accepted, would make you (after the 
author of ' Kubla Khan ') the foremost 
of the poets of the world ; at no long dis- 
tance would come Mr. William Morris as 
he was when he wrote ' Golden Wings,' 
'The Blue Closet,' and 'The Sailing of 
the Sword ; ' and, close up, Mr. Lear, the 
author of ' The Yongi Bongi Bo,' and 
the lay of the ' Jumblies.' 

On the other hand Homer would sink 
into the limbo to which you consigned 
Moliere. If we may judge a theory by 
its results, when compared with the de- 
liberate verdict of the world, your aes- 
thetic does not seem to hold water. The 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE 147 

1 Odyssey ' is not really inferior to ' Ula- 
lume,' as it ought to be if your doctrine 
of poetry were correct, nor ' Le Festin 
de Pierre ' to ' Undine.' Yet you de- 
serve the praise of having been con- 
stant, in your poetic practice, to your 
poetic principles — principles commonly 
deserted by poets who, like Wordsworth, 
have published their aesthetic system. 
Your pieces are few ; and Dr. Johnson 
would have called you, like Fielding, * a 
barren rascal.' But how can a writer's 
verses be numerous if with him, as with 
you, ' poetry is not a pursuit but a pas- 
sion . . . which cannot at will be ex- 
cited with an eye to the paltry compen- 
sations or the more paltry commenda- 
tions of mankind ! ' Of you it may be 
said, more truly than Shelley said it of 
himself, that 'to ask you for anything 
human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a 
leg of mutton.' 

Humanity must always be, to the ma- 
jority of men, the true stuff of poetry ; 
and only a minority will thank you for 



I48 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

that rare music which (like the strains 
of the fiddler in the story) is touched on 
a single string, and on an instrument 
fashioned from the spoils of the grave. 
You chose, or you were destined 

To vary from the kindly race of men ; 

and the consequences, which wasted your 
life, pursue your reputation. 

For your stories has been reserved a 
boundless popularity, and that highest 
success — the success of a perfectly sym- 
pathetic translation. By this time, of 
course, you have made the acquaintance 
of your translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, 
who so strenuously shared your views 
about Mr. Emerson and the Transcen- 
dentalists, and who so energetically re- 
sisted all those ideas of ' progress ' which 
1 came from Hell or Boston.' On this 
point, however, the world continues to 
differ from you and M. Baudelaire, and 
perhaps there is only the choice between 
our optimism and universal suicide or 
universal opium-eating. But to discuss 



EDGAR ALLAN FOE 1 49 

your ultimate ideas is perhaps a profit- 
less digression from the topic of your 
prose romances. 

An English critic (probably a North- 
erner at heart) has described them as 
'Hawthorne and delirium tremens.' I 
am not aware that extreme orderliness, 
masterly elaboration, and unchecked 
progress towards a predetermined effect 
are characteristics of the visions of de- 
lirium. If they be, then there is a deal 
of truth in the criticism, and a good 
deal of delirium tremens in your style. 
But your ingenuity, your completeness, 
your occasional luxuriance of fancy and 
wealth of jewel-like words, are not, per- 
haps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at 
his command. He was a great writer — 
the greatest writer in prose fiction whom 
America has produced. But you and he 
have not much in common, except a cer- 
tain mortuary turn of mind and a taste 
for gloomy allegories about the workings 
of conscience. 

I forbear to anticipate your verdict 



150 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

about the latest essays of American fic- 
tion. These by no means follow in the 
lines which you laid down about brevity 
and the steady working to one single ef- 
fect. Probably you would not be very 
tolerant (tolerance was not your leading 
virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your country- 
men's favourite novelist. He is long, 
he is didactic, he is eminently unin- 
spired. In the works of one who is, 
what you were called yourself, a Bos- 
tonian, you would admire, at least, the 
acute observation, the subtlety, and the 
unfailing distinction. But, destitute of 
humour as you unhappily but undeni- 
ably were, you would miss, I fear, the 
charm of 'Daisy Miller.' You would ad- 
mit the unity of effect secured in ' Wash- 
ington Square,' though that effect is as 
remote as possible from the terror of 
1 The House of Usher ' or the vindic- 
tive triumph of ' The Cask of Amontil- 
lado.' 

Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and 
solitary spirit : a genius tethered to the 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 151 

hack-work of the press, a gentleman 
among canaille, a poet among poetasters, 
dowered with a scholar's taste without a 
scholar's training, embittered by his sen- 
sitive scorn, and all unsupported by his 
consolations. 



XV. 

To Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 

Rodono, St. Mary's Loch : 
Sept. 8, 1885. 

Sir, — In your biography it is re- 
corded that you not only won the favour 
of all men and women ; but that a do- 
mestic fowl conceived an affection for 
you, and that a pig, by his will, had 
never been severed from your company. 
If some Circe had repeated in my case 
her favourite miracle of turning mortals 
into swine, and had given me a choice, 
into that fortunate pig, blessed among 
his race, would I have been converted ! 
You, almost alone among men of letters, 
still, like a living friend, win and charm 
us out of the past ; and if one might call 
up a poet, as the scholiast tried to call 
Homer, from the shades, who would not, 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 1 53 

out of all the rest, demand some hours 
of your society ? Who that ever med- 
dled with letters, what child of the irrita- 
ble race, possessed even a tithe of your 
simple manliness, of the heart that never 
knew a touch of jealousy, that envied no 
man his laurels, that took honour and 
wealth as they came, but never would 
have deplored them had you missed both 
and remained but the Border sportsman 
and the Border antiquary ? 

Were the word ' genial ' not so much 
profaned, were it not misused in easy 
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and 
sensual indolence, that worn old term 
might be applied, above all men, to ' the 
Shirra.' But perhaps we scarcely need 
a word (it would be seldom in use) for 
a character so rare, or rather so lonely, 
in its nobility and charm as that of Wal- 
ter Scott. Here, in the heart of your 
own country, among your own grey 
round-shouldered hills (each so like the 
other that the shadow of one falling on 
its neighbour exactly outlines that neigh- 



154 LE TTERS TO DEAD A UTHORS 

hour's shape), it is of you and of your 
works that a native of the Forest is 
most frequently brought in mind. All 
the spirits of the river and the hill, all 
the dying refrains of ballad and the 
fading echoes of story, all the memory 
of the wild past, each legend of burn 
and loch, seem to have combined to in- 
form your spirit, and to secure them- 
selves an immortal life in your song. It 
is through you that we remember them ; 
and in recalling them, as in treading 
each hillside in this land, we again re- 
member you and bless you. 

It is not ' Sixty Years Since ' the echo 
of Tweed among his pebbles fell for the 
last time on your ear ; not sixty years 
since, and how much is altered ! But 
two generations have passed ; the lad 
who used to ride from Edinburgh to 
Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, 
and old, is still vending, in George Street, 
old books and new. Of politics I have 
not the heart to speak. Little joy would 
you have had in most that has befallen 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 1 55 

since the Reform Bill was passed, to the 
chivalrous cry of 'burke Sir Walter/ 
We are still very Radical in the Forest, 
and you were taken away from many 
evils to come. How would the cheek of 
Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed 
at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, 
Maiwand, and many others that recall 
political cowardice or military incapac- 
ity ! On the other hand, who but you 
could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or 
wedded with immortal verse the names 
of Hamilton (who fell with Cavagnari), 
of the two Stewarts, of many another 
clansman, brave among the bravest ! 
Only he who told how 

The stubborn spearmen still made good 
Their dark impenetrable wood 

could have fitly rhymed a score of feats 
of arms in which, as at M'Neill's Zareeba 
and at Abu Klea, 

Groom fought like noble, squire like knight, 
As fearlessly and well. 

Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may 
wax faint, and the voting classes may 



156 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. 

forget that they are Britons ; but when 
it comes to blows our righting men might 
cry, with Leyden, 

My name is little Jock Elliot, 
And wha daur meddle wi' me ! 

Much is changed, in the country-side as 
well as in the country ; but much re- 
mains. The little towns of your time 
are populous and excessively black with 
the smoke of factories — not, I fear, at 
present very flourishing. In Galashiels 
you still see the little change-house and 
the cluster of cottages round the Laird's 
lodge, like the clachan of Tully Veolan. 
But these plain remnants of the old 
Scotch towns are almost buried in a 
multitude of ' smoky dwarf houses ' — a 
living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has 
found the fitting phrase for these dwell- 
ings, once for. all. All over the Forest 
the waters are dirty and poisoned : I 
think they are filthiest below Hawick ; 
but this may be mere local prejudice in 
a Selkirk man. To keep them clean 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 1 57 

costs money ; and, though improve- 
ments are often promised, I cannot see 
much change for the better. Abbots- 
ford, luckily, is above Galashiels, and 
only receives the dirt and dyes of Sel- 
kirk, Peebles, Walkerburn, and Inner- 
lethen. On the other hand, your ill- 
omened later dwelling, ' the unhappy 
palace of your race,' is overlooked by 
villas that prick a cockney ear among 
their larches, hotels of the future. Ah, 
Sir, Scotland is a strange place. Whisky 
is exiled from some of our caravanserais, 
and they have banished Sir John Barley- 
corn. It seems as if the views of the 
excellent critic (who wrote your life 
lately, and said you had left no descend- 
ants, le panvre homme /) were beginning 
to prevail. This pious biographer was 
greatly shocked by that capital story 
about the keg of whisky that arrived at 
the Liddesdale farmer's during family 
prayers. Your Toryism also was an of- 
fence to him. 

Among these vicissitudes of things 



158 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and the overthrow of customs, let us be 
thankful that, beyond the reach of the 
manufacturers, the Border country re- 
mains as kind and homely as ever. I 
looked at Ashiestiel some days ago : the 
house seemed just as it may have been 
when you left it for Abbotsford, only 
there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, 
the hill on the opposite bank of the 
Tweed was covered to the crest with 
turnips, and the burn did not sing below 
the little bridge, for in this arid summer 
the burn was dry. But there was still 
a grilse that rose to a big March brown 
in the shrunken stream below Elibank. 
This may not interest you, who styled 
yourself 

No fisher, 

But a well-wisher 

To the gamel 

Still, as when you were thinking over 
Marmion, a man might have ' grand 
gallops among the hills ' — those grave 
wastes of heather and bent that sever 
all the watercourses and roll their sheep- 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 1 59 

covered pastures from Dollar Law to 
White Combe, and from White Combe 
to the Three Brethren Cairn and the 
Windburg and Skelf - hill Pen. Yes, 
Teviotdale is pleasant still, and there is 
not a drop of dye in the water, purior 
electro, of Yarrow. St. Mary's Loch lies 
beneath me, smitten with wind and rain 
— the St. Mary's of North and of the 
Shepherd. Only the trout, that see a 
myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than 
of yore. The Shepherd could no longer 
fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much 
of a size that the country people took 
them for herrings. 

The grave of Piers Cockburn is still 
not desecrated : hard by it lies, within a 
little wood ; and beneath that slab of old 
sandstone, and the graven letters, and 
the sword and shield, sleep ' Piers Cock- 
burn and Marjory his wife.' Not a hun- 
dred yards off was the castle-door where 
they hanged him ; this is the tomb of 
the ballad, and the lady that buried him 
rests now with her wild lord. 



l6o LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Oh, wat ye no my heart was sair, 

When I happit the mouls on his yellow hair ; 

Oh, wat ye no my heart was wae, 

When I turned about and went my way ! 1 

Here too hearts have broken, and there 
is a sacredness in the shadow and be- 
neath these clustering berries of the 
rowan-trees. That sacredness, that rev- 
erent memory of our old land, it is 
always and inextricably blended with 
cur memories, with our thoughts, with 
our love of you. Scotchmen, methinks, 

1 Lord Napier and Ettrick points out to me that, 
unluckily, the tradition is erroneous. Piers was not 
executed at all. William Cockburn suffered in Edin- 
burgh. But the Border Minstrelsy overrides history. 

Criminal Trials in Scotland, by Robert Pitcairn, 
Esq. Vol. i. part I. p. 144, a. d. 1530. 17 Jac. V. 

May 16. William Cokburne of Henderland, con- 
victed (in presence of the King) of high treason com- 
mitted by him in bringing Alexander Forestare and 
his son, Englishmen, to the plundering of Archibald 
Somervile ; and for treasonably bringing certain 
Englishmen to the lands of Glenquhome ; and for 
common theft, common reset of theft, out-putting and 
in-putting thereof. Sentence. For which causes and 
crimes he has forfeited his life, lands, and goods, 
movable and immovable ; which shall be escheated 
to the Kin<r. Beheaded. 



SIR WALTER SCOTT l6l 

who owe so much to you, owe you most 
for the example you gave of the beauty 
of a life of honour, showing them what, 
by Heaven's blessing, a Scotchman still 
might be. 

Words, empty and unavailing — for 
what words of ours can speak our 
thoughts or interpret our affections ! 
From you first, as we followed the deer 
with King James, or rode with William 
of Deloraine on his-midnight errand, did 
we learn what Poetry means and all the 
happiness that is in the gift of song. 
This and more than may be told you 
gave us, that are not forgetful, not un- 
grateful, though our praise be unequal 
to our gratitude. Fungor inani munere! 
ii 



XVI. 

To Ensebius of Ccesarea. 

(CONCERNING THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN.) 

Touching the Gods of the Heathen, 
most reverend Father, thou art not ig- 
norant that even now, as in the time of 
thy probation on earth, there is great 
dissension. That these feigned Deities 
and idols, the work of men's hands, are 
no longer worshipped thou knowest ; 
neither do men eat meat offered to idols. 
Even as spoke that last Oracle which 
murmured forth, the latest and the only 
true voice from Delphi, even so 'the fair- 
wrought court divine hath fallen ; no 
more hath Phoebus his home, no more 
his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of 
water; nay, the sweet -voiced water is 
silent.' The fane is ruinous, and the 
images of men's idolatry are dust. 



EUSEBIUS OF C^ESAREA 163 

Nevertheless, most worshipful, men 
do still dispute about the beginnings of 
those sinful Gods : such as Zeus, Athene, 
and Dionysus : and marvel how first they 
won their dominion over the souls of the 
foolish peoples. Now, concerning these 
things there is not one belief, but many; 
howbeit, there are two main kinds of 
opinion. One sect of philosophers be- 
lieves — as thyself, with heavenly learn- 
ing, didst not vainly persuade — that the 
Gods were the inventions of wild and 
bestial folk, who, long before cities were 
builded or life was honourably ordained, 
fashioned forth evil spirits in their own 
savage likeness ; ay, or in the likeness 
of the very beasts that perish. To this 
judgment, as it is set forth in thy Book 
of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, 
humble as I am, do give my consent. 
But on the other side are many and 
learned men, chiefly of the tribes of the 
Alemanni, who have almost conquered 
the whole inhabited world. These, be- 
ing unwilling to suppose that the Hel- 



1 64 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

lenes were in bondage to superstitions 
handed down from times of utter dark- 
ness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold 
with the heathen philosophers, even 
with the writers whom thou, most ven- 
erable, didst confound with thy wisdom 
and chasten with the scourge of small 
cords of thy wit. 

Thus, like the heathen, our doctors 
and teachers maintain that the Gods of 
the nations were, in the beginning, such 
pure natural creatures as the blue sky, 
the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and 
the fire ; but, as time went on, men, for- 
getting the meaning of their own speech 
and no longer understanding the tongue 
of their own fathers, were misled and 
beguiled into fashioning all those lam- 
entable tales : as that Zeus, for love of 
mortal women, took the shape of a bull, 
a ram, a serpent, an ant, an eagle, and 
sinned in such wise as it is a shame 
even to speak of. 

Behold, then, most worshipful, how 
these doctors and learned men argue, 



EUSEBIUS OF CMS ARE A 1 65 

even like the philosophers of the hea- 
then whom thou didst confound. For 
they declare the Gods to have been nat- 
ural elements, sun and sky and storm, 
even as did thy opponents ; and, like 
them, as thou saidst, ' they are nowise 
at one with each other in their explana- 
tions.' For of old some boasted that 
Hera was the Air ; and some that she 
signified the love of woman and man ; 
and some that she was the waters above 
the Earth ; and others that she was the 
Earth beneath the waters ; and yet oth- 
ers that she was the Night, for that 
Night is the shadow of Earth : as if, 
forsooth, the men who first worshipped 
Hera had understanding of these things ! 
And when Hera and Zeus quarrel un- 
seemly (as Homer declareth), this meant 
(said the learned in thy days) no more 
than the strife and confusion of the ele- 
ments, and was not in the beginning an 
idle slanderous tale. 

To all which, most worshipful, thou 
didst answer wisely : saying that Hera 



1 66 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

could not be both night, and earth, and 
water, and air, and the love of sexes, and 
the confusion of the elements ; but that 
all these opinions were vain dreams, and 
the guesses of the learned. And why 
— thou saidst — even if the Gods were 
pure natural creatures, are such foul 
things told of them in the Mysteries as 
it is not fitting for me to declare. 'These 
wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, 
and corruptions, that would be shameful 
in men, why,' thou saidst, ' were they 
attributed to the natural elements ; and 
wherefore did the Gods constantly show 
themselves, like the sorcerers called 
were-wolves, in the shape of the perish- 
able beasts?' But, mainly, thou didst 
argue that, till the philosophers of the 
heathen were agreed among themselves, 
not all contradicting each the other, they 
had no semblance of a sure foundation 
for their doctrine. 

To all this and more, most worshipful 
Father, I know not what the heathen 
answered thee. But, in our time, the 



EUSEBIUS OF C^ESAREA 1 67 

learned men who stand to it that the 
heathen Gods were in the beginning the 
pure elements, and that the nations, for- 
getting their first love and the signifi- 
cance of their own speech, became con- 
fused and were betrayed into foul sto- 
ries about the pure Gods — these learned 
men, I say, agree no whit among them- 
selves. Nay, they differ one from an- 
other, not less than did Plutarch and 
Porphyry and Theagenes, and the rest 
whom thou didst laugh to scorn. Bear 
with me, Father, while I tell thee how 
the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do 
contend among themselves ; and yet 
these differences of theirs they call 'Sci- 
ence ' ! 

Consider the goddess Athene, who 
sprang armed from the head of Zeus, 
even as — among the fables of the poor 
heathen fork of seas thou never knew- 
est — goddesses are fabled to leap out 
from the armpits or feet of their fathers. 
Thou must know that what Plato, in the 
'Cratylus/ made Socrates say in jest, 



1 68 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

the learned among us practise in sad 
earnest. For, when they wish to explain 
the nature of any God, they first examine 
his name, and torment the letters thereof, 
arranging and altering them according 
to their will, and flying off to the speech 
of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, 
and other Barbarians, if Greek will not 
serve their turn. How saith Socrates ? 
* I bethink me of a very new and inge- 
nious idea that occurs to me ; and, if I 
do not mind, I shall be wiser than I 
should be by to-morrow's dawn. My no- 
tion is that we may put in and pull out 
letters at pleasure and alter the accents.' 
Even so do our learned — not at pleas- 
ure, maybe, but according to certain 
fixed laws (so they declare) ; yet none 
the more do they agree among them- 
selves. And I deny not that they dis- 
cover many things true and good to be 
known ; but, as touching the names of 
the Gods, their learning, as it standeth, 
is confusion. Look, then, at the god- 
dess Athene : taking one example out 



EUSEBIUS OF CJESAREA 169 

of hundreds. We have dwelling in our 
coasts Muellerus, the most erudite of the 
doctors of .the Alemanni, and the most 
golden - mouthed. Concerning Athene, 
he saith that her name is none other 
than, in the ancient tongue of the Brach- 
manae, Akand, which, being interpreted, 
means the Dawn. ' And that the morn- 
ing light,' saith he, ' offers the best start- 
ing-point ; for the later growth of Athene 
has been proved, I believe, beyond the 
reach of doubt or even cavil.' 1 

Yet this same doctor candidly lets us 
know that another of his nation, the 
witty Benfeius, hath devised another 
sense and origin of Athene, taken from 
the speech of the old Medes. But Mu- 
ellerus declares to us that whosoever 
shall examine the contention of Benfeius 
'will be bound, in common honesty, to 
confess that it is untenable.' This, Fa- 
ther, is 'one for Benfeius,' as the saying 
goes. And as Muellerus holds that these 

1 'The Lesson of Jupiter.' — Nineteenth Century, 
October, 1885. 



170 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

matters 'admit of almost mathematical 
precision/ it would seem that Benfeius is 
but a Dummkopf, as the Alemanni say, 
in their own language, when they would 
be pleasant among themselves. 

Now, wouldst thou credit it ? despite 
the mathematical plainness of the facts, 
other Alemanni agree neither with Muel- 
lerus, nor yet with Benfeius, and will 
neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, 
nor yet that she is ' the feminine of the 
Zend Thrdetdna atliwyana? Lo, you ! 
how Prellerus goes about to show that 
her name is drawn not from Ahand and 
the old Brachmanas, nor athwydtia and 
the old Medes, but from 'the root aid, 
whence aW-qp, the air, or a0, whence av6os, 
a flower.' Yea, and Prellerus will have 
it that no man knows the verity of this 
matter. None the less he is very bold, 
and will none of the Dawn ; but holds 
to it that Athene was, from the first, 
1 the clear pure height of the Air, which 
is exceeding pure in Attica.' 

Now, Father, as if all this were not 



EUSEBIUS OF C^ESAREA iy\ 

enough, comes one Roscherus in, with a 
mighty great volume on the Gods, and 
Furtwaenglerus, among others, for his 
ally. And these doctors will neither 
with Rueckertus and Hermannus, take 
Athene for ' wisdom in person ; ' nor 
with Welckerus and Prellerus, for 'the 
goddess of air ; ' nor even, with Muelle- 
rus and mathematical certainty, for ' the 
Morning-Red : ' but they say that Athene 
is the 'black thunder -cloud, and the 
lightning that leapeth therefrom ' ! I 
make no doubt that other Alemanni 
are of other minds : quot Alemanni tot 
sent entice. 

Yea, as thou saidst of the learned 

heathen, OvSe yap aAA.77A.01? <rvp,<£a)va (fivcrLO- 

\oyova-Lv. Yet these disputes of theirs 
they call ' Science ' ! But if any man 
says to the learned : ' Best of men, you 
are erudite, and laborious and witty ; 
but, till you are more of the same mind, 
your opinions cannot be styled knowl- 
edge. Nay, they are at present of no 
avail whereon to found any doctrine con- 



172 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

cerning the Gods ' — that man is railed 
at for his 'mean ' and ' weak ' arguments. 
Was it thus, Father, that the heathen 
railed against thee ? But I must still 
believe, with thee, that these evil tales 
of the Gods were invented 'when man's 
life was yet brutish and wandering ' (as 
is the life of many tribes that even now 
tell like tales), and were maintained in 
honour of the later Greeks ■ because 
none dared alter the ancient beliefs of 
his ancestors.' Farewell, Father; and 
all good be with thee, wishes thy well- 
wisher and thy disciple. 



XVII. 

To Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

Sir, — In your lifetime on earth you 
were not more than commonly curious 
as to what was said by 'the herd of 
mankind,' if I may quote your own 
phrase. It was that of one who loved 
his fellow-men, but did not in his less 
enthusiastic moments overestimate their 
virtues and their discretion. Removed 
so far away from our hubbub, and that 
world where, as you say, we ' pursue our 
serious folly as of old,' you are, one may 
guess, but moderately concerned about 
the fate of your writings and your repu- 
tation. As to the first, you have some- 
where said, in one of your letters, that 
the final judgment on your merits as a 
poet is in the hands of posterity, and 
that you fear the verdict will be ' Guilty,' 



174 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and the sentence 'Death.' Such appre- 
hensions cannot have been fixed or fre- 
quent in the mind of one whose genius 
burned always with a clearer and stead- 
ier flame to the last. The jury of which 
you spoke has met : a mixed jury and a 
merciful. The verdict is ' Well done,' 
and the sentence Immortality of Fame. 
There have been, there are, dissenters ; 
yet probably they will be less and less 
heard as the years go on. 

One judge, or juryman, has made up 
his mind that prose was your true prov- 
ince, and that your letters will outlive 
your lays. I know not whether it was 
the same or an equally well - inspired 
critic, who spoke of your most perfect 
lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his 
ill-tied cravats) as ' a gallery of your fail- 
ures.' But the general voice does not 
echo these utterances of a too subtle in- 
tellect. At a famous University (not 
your own) once existed a band of men 
known as 'The Trinity Sniffers.' Per- 
haps the spirit of the sniffer may still 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1 75 

inspire some of the jurors who from 
time to time make themselves heard in 
your case. The 'Quarterly Review/ I 
fear, is still unreconciled. It regards 
your attempts as tainted by the spirit of 
'The Liberal Movement in English Lit- 
erature ; ' and it is impossible, alas ! to 
maintain with any success that you were 
a Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford 
you are forgiven ; and the old rooms 
where you let the oysters burn (was not 
your founder, King Alfred, onCe guilty 
of similar negligence ?) are now shown 
to pious pilgrims. 

But Conservatives, 't is rumoured, are 
still averse to your opinions, and are be- 
lieved to prefer to yours the works of 
the Reverend Mr. Keble, and, indeed, of 
the clergy in general. But, in spite of 
all this, your poems, like the affections 
of the true lovers in Theocritus, are still 
'in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the 
lips of the young.' It is in your lyrics 
that you live, and I do not mean that 
every one could pass an examination in 



176 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

the plot of ' Prometheus Unbound.' 
Talking of this piece, by the way, a 
Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in 
you a hankering after life in a cave — 
doubtless an unconsciously inherited 
memory from cave - man. Speaking of 
cave-man reminds me that you once 
spoke of deserting song for prose, and 
of producing a history of the moral, in- 
tellectual, and political elements in hu- 
man society, which, we now agree, be- 
gan, as Asia would fain have ended, in a 
cave. 

Fortunately you gave us ' Adonais ' 
and 'Hellas' instead of this treatise, and 
we have now successfully written the 
natural history of Man for ourselves. 
Science tells us that before becoming a 
cave-dweller he was a Brute ; Experience 
daily proclaims that he constantly re- 
verts to his original condition. Lliommc 
est un mcchant animal, in spite of your 
boyish efforts to add pretty girls ' to the 
list of the good, the disinterested, and 
the free.' 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1 77 

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, 
nor the sterile din of Politics, were ' the 
haunts meet for thee.' Watching the 
yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the 
reflected pine forest in the water-pools, 
watching the sunset as it faded, and the 
dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair 
and fleeting things into a tissue where 
light and music were at one, that was 
the task of Shelley ! ' To ask you for 
anything human,' you said, l was like 
asking for a leg of mutton at a gin- 
shop.' Nay, rather, like asking Apollo 
and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to 
give us beef for ambrosia, and port for 
nectar. Each poet gives what he has, 
and what he can offer ; you spread be- 
fore us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, 
and shall we turn away, with a sneer, be- 
cause, out of all the multitudes of sing- 
ers, one is spiritual and strange, one has 
seen Artemis unveiled ? One, like An- 
chises, has been beloved of the Goddess, 
and his eyes, when he looks on the com- 
mon world of common men, are, like the 
12 



178 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

eyes of Anchises, blind with excess of 
light. Let Shelley sing of what he saw, 
what none saw but Shelley ! 

Notwithstanding the popularity of 
your poems (the most romantic of things 
didactic), our world is no better than the 
world you knew. This will disappoint 
you, who had ' a passion for reforming it.' 
Kings and priests are very much where 
you left them. True, we have a poet 
who assails them, at large, frequently 
and fearlessly ; yet Mr. Swinburne has 
never, like ' kind Hunt,' been in prison, 
nor do we fear for him a charge of trea- 
son. Moreover, chemical science has 
discovered new and ingenious ways of 
destroying principalities and powers. 
You would be interested in the methods, 
but your peaceful Revolutionism, which 
disdained physical force, would regret 
their application. 

Our foreign affairs are not in a state 
which even you would consider satisfac- 
tory ; for we have just had to contend 
with a Revolt of Islam, and we still find 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1 79 

in Russia exactly the qualities which 
you recognised ariH described. We have 
a great statesman whose methods and 
eloquence somewhat resemble those you 
attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. 
Alas ! he is a youth of more than sev- 
enty summers ; and not in his time will 
Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass 
a peaceful millennium in twining buds 
and beams. 

In domestic affairs most of the Re- 
forms you desired to see have been car- 
ried. Ireland has received Emancipa- 
tion, and almost everything else she can 
ask for. I regret to say that she is still 
unhappy ; her wounds unstanched, her 
wrongs unforgiven. At home we have 
enfranchised the paupers, and expect 
the most happy results. Paupers (as 
Mr. Gladstone says) are ' our own flesh 
and blood/ and, as we compel them to 
be vaccinated, so we should permit them 
to vote. Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse 
Collings (how you would have loved that 
man !) has a Bill for extending the price- 



180 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

less boon of the vote to inmates of Pau- 
per Lunatic Asylums ? This may prove 
that last element in the Elixir of po- 
litical happiness which we have long 
sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret 
to hear, are still unpopular ; but the new 
Parliament has done something for Mr. 
Bradlaugh. You should have known our 
Charles while you were in the * Queen 
Mab ' stage. I fear you wandered, later, 
from his robust condition of intellectual 
development. 

As to your private life, many biogra- 
phers contrive to make public as much 
of it as possible. Your name, even in 
life, was, alas ! a kind of ducdame to 
bring people of no very great sense into 
your circle. This curious fascination has 
attracted round your memory a feeble 
folk of commentators, biographers, anec- 
dotists, and others of the tribe. They 
swarm round you like carrion-flies round 
a sensitive plant, like night-birds bewil- 
dered by the sun. Men of sense and 
taste have written on you, indeed ; but 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY l8l 

your weaker admirers are now disputing 
as to whether it was your heart, or a less 
dignified and most troublesome organ, 
which escaped the flames of the funeral 
pyre. These biographers fight terribly 
among themselves, and vainly prolong 
the memory of * old unhappy far - off 
things, and sorrows long ago.' Let us 
leave them and their squabbles over what 
is unessential, their raking up of old let- 
ters and old stories. 

The town has lately yawned a weary 
laugh over an enemy of yours, who has 
produced two heavy volumes, styled by 
him 'The Real Shelley.' The real Shel- 
ley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived 
of by a worthy gentleman so prejudiced 
and so skilled in taking up things by the 
wrong handle that I wonder he has not 
made a name in the exact science of 
Comparative Mythology. He criticises 
you in the spirit of that Christian Apol- 
ogist, the Englishman who called you ' a 
damned Atheist ' in the post-office at 
Pisa. He finds that you had ' a little 



1 82 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

turned-up nose,' a feature no less impor- 
tant in his system than was the nose of 
Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the 
history of the world. To be in harmony 
with your nose, you were a 'phenome- 
nal ' liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, 
partly insane, an evil-tempered monster, 
a self-righteous person, full of self-appro- 
bation — in fact you were the Beast of 
this pious Apocalypse. Your friend Dr. 
Lind was an embittered and scurrilous 
apothecary, 'a bad old man.' But enough 
of this inopportune brawler. 

For Humanity, of which you hoped 
such great things, Science predicts ex- 
tinction in a night of Frost. The sun 
will grow cold, slowly — as slowly as 
doom came on Jupiter in your ' Prome- 
theus,' but as surely. If this nightmare 
be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in 
some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equa- 
tor, will read, by a fading lamp charged 
with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the 
poetry of Shelley. So reading, he, the 
latest of his race, will not wholly be de- 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 1 83 

prived of those sights which alone (says 
the nameless Greek) make life worth en- 
during. In your verse he will have sight 
of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of 
dawn and the gloom of earthquake and 
eclipse. He will be face to face, in 
fancy, with the great powers that are 
dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable 
azure of the heavens. In Shelley's po- 
etry, while Man endures, all those will 
survive ; for your ' voice is as the voice 
of winds and tides,' and perhaps more 
deathless than all of these, and only per- 
ishable with the perishing of the human 
spirit. 



XVIII. 

To Monsieur de Moliere, Valet de Cham- 
bre du Roi. 

Monsieur, — With what awe does a 
writer venture into the presence of the 
great Moliere ! As a courtier in your 
time would scratch humbly (with his 
comb!) at the door of the Grand Mon- 
arch, so I presume to draw near your 
dwelling among the Immortals. You, 
like the king who, among all his titles, 
has now none so proud as that of the 
friend of Moliere — you found your do- 
minions small, humble, and distracted ; 
you raised them to the dignity of an em- 
pire : what Louis XIV. did for France 
you achieved for French comedy ; and 
the baton of Scapin still wields its sway 
though the sword of Louis was broken 
at Blenheim. For the King the Pyre- 



MONSIEUR BE MO LI ERE 1 85 

nees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist ; 
by a more magnificent conquest you 
overcame the Channel. If England 
vanquished your country's arms, it was 
through you that France ferum victor em 
cepit, and restored the dynasty of Com- 
edy to the land whence she had been 
driven. Ever since Dryden borrowed 
' L'Etoufdi,' our tardy apish nation has 
lived (in matters theatrical) on the spoils 
of the wits of France. 

In one respect, to be sure, times and 
manners have altered. While you lived, 
taste kept the French drama pure ; and 
it was the congenial business of English 
playwrights to foist their rustic gross- 
ness and their large Fescennine jests 
into the urban page of Moliere. Now 
they are diversely occupied ; and it is 
their affair to lend modesty where they 
borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the 
cheek of the Lord Chamberlain. But 
still, as has ever been our wont since 
Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated 
your successes — still we pilfer the plays 



1 86 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

of France, and take our bien, as you said 
in your lordly manner, wherever we can 
find it. We are the privateers of the 
stage ; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a 
comedy pleases the town which has not 
first been ' cut out ' from the country- 
men of Moliere. Why this should be, 
and what ' tenebriferous star ' (as Para- 
celsus, your companion in the ' Dia- 
logues des Morts,' would have believed) 
thus darkens the sun of English humour, 
we know not ; but certainly our depend- 
ence on France is the sincerest tribute 
to you. Without you, neither Rotrou, 
nor Corneille, nor 'a wilderness of mon- 
keys ' like Scarron, could ever have 
given Comedy to France and restored 
her to Europe. 

While we owe to you, Monsieur, the 
beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and 
beneficent as Peace in the play of Aris- 
tophanes, it is still to you that we must 
turn when of comedies we desire the 
best. If you studied with daily and 
nightly care the works of Plautus and 



MONSIEUR DE MOLIERE 1 87 

Terence, if you Met no musty bouquin 
escape you ' (so your enemies declared), 
it was to some purpose that you laboured. 
Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all 
who came before you ; and from those 
that follow, however fresh, we turn : we 
turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, 
from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from Mus- 
set and Pailleron and Labiche, to that 
crowded world of your creations. ' Cre- 
ations ' one may well say, for you antici- 
pated Nature herself : you gave us, be- 
fore she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who 
was a gentleman not a lacquey ; in a mot 
of Don Juan's, the secret of the new Re- 
ligion and the watchword of Comte, 
V amour de V humanity 

Before you where can we find, save 
in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour ; 
and where, unless it be in Montaigne, 
the wise philosophy of a secular civilisa- 
tion ? With a heart the most tender, 
delicate, loving, and generous, a heart 
often in agony and torment, you had to 
make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) 



1 88 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

without any whisper of promise, or hope, 
or warning from Religion. Yes, in an 
age when the greatest mind of all, the 
mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only 
help was in voluntary blindness, that the 
only chance was to hazard all on a bet 
at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be 
blinded, or to pretend to see what you 
found invisible. 

In Religion you beheld no promise of 
help. When the Jesuits and Jansenists 
of your time saw, each of them, in Tar- 
tufe the portrait of their rivals (as each 
of the laughable Marquises in your play 
conceived that you were girding at his 
neighbour), you all the while were mock- 
ing every credulous excess of Faith. In 
the sermons preached to Agnes we 
surely hear your private laughter ; in 
the arguments for credulity which are 
presented to Don Juan by his valet we 
listen to the eternal self-defence of su- 
perstition. Thus, desolate of belief, you 
sought for the permanent element of life 
— precisely where Pascal recognised all 



MONSIEUR DE MO LIE RE 1 89 

that was most fleeting and unsubstan- 
tial — in divertissement ; in the pleas- 
ure of looking on, a spectator of the ac- 
cidents of existence, an observer of the 
follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the 
Epicurean, you seem to regard our life 
as a play that is played, as a comedy ; 
yet how often the tragic note comes in ! 
What pity, and in the laughter what 
an accent of tears, as of rain in the 
wind ! No comedian has been so kindly 
and human as you ; none has had a 
heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and 
to leave them sometimes, in a sense, su- 
perior to their tormentors. Sganarelle, 
M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, 
and the rest — our sympathy, somehow, 
is with them, after all ; and M. de Pour- 
ceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his 
misadventures. 

Though triumphant Youth and mali- 
cious. Love in your plays may batter and 
defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they 
have not all the victory, or you did not 
mean that they should win it. They go 



I90 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

off with laughter, and their victim with 
a grimace ; but in him we, that are past 
our youth, behold an actor in an unending 
tragedy, the defeat of a generation. Your 
sympathy is not wholly with the dogs 
that are having their day ; you can throw 
a bone or a crust to the dog that has had 
his, and has been taught that it is over 
and ended. Yourself not unlearned in 
shame, in jealousy, in endurance of the 
wanton pride of men (how could the 
poor player and the husband of Celimene 
be untaught in that experience ?), you 
never sided quite heartily, as other com- 
edians have done, with young prosperity 
and rank and power. 

I am not the first who has dared to 
approach you in the Shades ; for just 
after your own death the author of ■ Les 
Dialogues des Morts ' gave you Paracel- 
sus as a companion, and the author of 
1 Le Jugement de Pluton ' made the 
1 mighty warder ' decide that ' Moliere 
should not talk philosophy.' These wri- 
ters, like most of us, feel that, after all, 



MONSIEUR DE MO LIE RE 191 

the comedies of the Contemplateur, of 
the translator of Lucretius, are a philos- 
ophy of life in themselves, and that in 
them we read the lessons of human ex- 
perience writ small and clear. 

What comedian but Moliere has com- 
bined with such depths — with the indig- 
nation of Alceste, the self-deception of 
Tartufe, the blasphemy of Don Juan — 
such wildness of irresponsible mirth, 
such humour, such wit ! Even now, 
when more than two hundred years have 
sped by, when so much water has flowed 
under the bridges and has borne away 
so many trifles of contemporary mirth 
{cetera fluminis ritu feruntur), even now 
we never laugh so well as when Masca- 
rille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread 
the boards in the Maison de Moliere. 
Since those mobile dark brows of yours 
ceased to make men laugh, since your 
voice denounced the ' demoniac ' man- 
ner of contemporary tragedians, I take 
leave to think that no player has been 
more worthy to wear the canons of Mas- 



I92 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

carille or the gown of Vadius than M. 
Coquelin of the Comedie Francaise. In 
him you have a successor to your Mas- 
carille so perfect, that the ghosts of play- 
goers of your date might cry, could they 
see him, that Moliere had come again. 
But, with all respect to the efforts of the 
fair, I doubt if Mdlle. Barthet, or Mdme. 
Croizette herself, would reconcile the 
town to the loss of the fair De Brie, and 
Madeleine, and the first, the true Celi- 
mene, Armande. Yet had you ever so 
merry a soubrette as Mdme. Samary, so 
exquisite a Nicole ? 

Denounced, persecuted, and buried 
hugger-mugger two hundred years ago, 
you are now not over-praised, but more 
worshipped, with more servility and os- 
tentation, studied with more prying cu- 
riosity than you may approve. Are not 
the Molieristes a body who carry adora- 
tion to fanaticism ? Any scrap of your 
handwriting (so few are these), any an- 
ecdote even remotely touching on your 
life, any fact that may prove your house 



MONSIEUR DE MOLIERE 193 

was numbered 1 5 not 22, is eagerly seized 
and discussed by your too minute his- 
torians. Concerning your private life, 
these men often write more like mali- 
cious enemies than friends ; repeating 
the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, 
and trying vainly to support them by 
grubbing in dusty parish registers. It 
is most necessary to defend you from 
your friends — from such friends as the 
veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Hous- 
saye, or the industrious but puzzle- 
headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek 
the living among the dead, and the im- 
mortal Moliere among the sweepings of 
attorneys' offices. As I regard them 
(for I have tarried in their tents) and as 
I behold their trivialities — the exercises 
of men who neglect Moliere's works to 
write about Moliere's great-grandmoth- 
er's second-best bed — I sometimes wish 
that Moliere were here to write on his 
devotees a new comedy, * Les Molier- 
istes.' How fortunate were they, Mon- 
sieur, who lived and worked with you, 
J 3 



194 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

who saw you day by day, who were at- 
tached, as Lagrange tells us, by the 
kindest loyalty to the best and most hon- 
ourable of men, the most open-handed in 
friendship, in charity the most delicate, 
of the heartiest sympathy ! Ah, that 
for one day I could behold you, writing 
in the study, rehearsing on the stage, 
musing in the lace-seller's shop, strolling 
through the Palais, turning over the new 
books at Billaine's, dusting your ruffles 
among the old volumes on the sunny 
stalls. Would that, through the ages, 
we could hear you after supper, merry 
with Boileau, and with Racine, — not 
yet a traitor, — laughing over Chapelain, 
combining to gird at him in an epigram, 
or mocking at Cotin, or talking your 
favourite philosophy, mindful of Des- 
cartes. Surely of all the wits none was 
ever so good a man, none ever made life 
so rich with humour and friendship. 



XIX. 

To Robert Burns. 

Sir, — Among men of Genius, and es- 
pecially among Poets, there are some to 
whom we turn with a peculiar and un- 
feigned affection ; there are others whom 
we admire rather than love. By some 
we are won with our will, by others con- 
quered against our desire. It has been 
your peculiar fortune to capture the 
hearts of a whole people — a people not 
usually prone to praise, but devoted with 
a personal and patriotic loyalty to you 
and to your reputation. In you every 
Scot who is a Scot sees, admires, and 
compliments Himself, his ideal self — 
independent, fond of whisky, fonder of 
the lassies ; you are the true represen- 
tative of him and of his nation. Next 
year will be the hundredth since the 



I96 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

press of Kilmarnock brought to light its 
solitary masterpiece, your Poems ; and 
next year, therefore, methinks, the rev- 
enue will receive a welcome accession 
from the abundance of whisky drunk in 
your honour. It is a cruel thing for any 
of your countrymen to feel that, where 
all the rest love, he can only admire ; 
where all the rest are idolators, he may 
not bend the knee ; but stands apart and 
beats upon his breast, observing, not 
adoring — a critic. Yet to some of us — 
petty souls, perhaps, and envious — that 
loud indiscriminating praise of ' Robbie 
Burns ' (for so they style you in their 
Change-house familiarity) has long been 
ungrateful ; and, among the treasures of 
your songs, we venture to select and 
even to reject. So it must be! We can- 
not all love Haggis, nor 'painch, tripe, 
and thairm,' and all those rural dainties 
which you celebrate as ' warm-reek in, 
rich ! ' • Rather too rich,' as the Young 
Lady said on an occasion recorded by 
Sam Weller. 



ROBERT BURNS 1 97 

Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware 

That jaups in luggies ; 
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer, 

Gie her a Haggis ! 

You have given her a Haggis, with a 
vengeance, and her ' gratefu' prayer ' is 
yours for ever. But if even an eternity 
of partridge may pall on the epicure, so 
of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights, 
cometh satiety at last. And yet what a 
glorious Haggis it is — the more em- 
phatically rustic and even Fescennine 
part of your verse ! We have had many 
a rural bard since Theocritus ' watched 
the visionary flocks,' but you are the 
only one of them all who has spoken the 
sincere Doric. Yours is the talk of the 
byre and the plough-tail ; yours is that 
large utterance of the early hinds. Even 
Theocritus minces matters, save where 
Lacon and Comatas quite outdo the 
swains of Ayrshire. ' But thee, Theoc- 
ritus, wha matches ? ' you ask, and your- 
self out-match him in this wide rude re- 
gion, trodden only by the rural Muse. 



I98 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

1 Thy rural loves are nature's sel' ; ' and 
the wooer of Jean Armour speaks more 
like a true shepherd than the elegant 
Daphnis of the ' Oaristys.' 

Indeed it is with this that moral crit- 
ics of your life reproach you, forgetting, 
perhaps, that in your amours you were 
but as other Scotch ploughmen and 
shepherds of the past and present. Et- 
trick may still, with Afghanistan, offer 
matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your 
antithesis, and the complement of the 
Scotch character) supposed ; but the 
morals of Ettrick are those of rural Sic- 
ily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your 
days. Over these matters the Kirk, 
with all her power, and the Free Kirk 
too, have had absolutely no influence 
whatever. To leave so delicate a topic, 
you were but as other swains, or, as 
1 that Birkie ca'd a lord,' Lord Byron ; 
only you combined (in certain of your 
letters) a libertine theory with your prac- 
tice ; you poured out in song your auda- 
cious raptures, your half-hearted repent- 



ROBERT BURNS 1 99 

ance, your shame and your scorn. You 
spoke the truth about rural lives and 
loves. We may like it or dislike it ; but 
we cannot deny the verity. 

Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, 
for you, as it was fortunate for Letters 
and for Scotland, that you were born at 
the meeting of two ages and of two 
worlds — precisely in the moment when 
bookish literature was beginning to reach 
the people, and when Society was first 
learning to admit the low-born to her 
Minor Mysteries ? Before you how many 
singers not less truly poets than yourself 

— though less versatile not less passion- 
ate, though less sensuous not less simple 

— had been born and had died in poor 
men's cottages ! There abides not even 
the shadow of a name of the old Scotch 
song-smiths, of the old ballad - makers. 
The authors of ' Clerk Saunders/ of 
'The Wife of Usher's Well,' of 'Fair 
Annie/ and * Sir Patrick Spens,' and 
'The Bonny Hind/ are as unknown to 
us as Homer, whom in their directness 



200 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

and force they resemble. They never, 
perhaps, gave their poems to writing • 
certainly they never gave them to the 
press. On the lips and in the hearts of 
the people they have their lives ; and 
the singers, after a life obscure and un- 
troubled by society or by fame, are for- 
gotten. ' The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly 
scattereth his Poppy.' 

Had you been born some years earlier 
you would have been even as these un- 
named Immortals, leaving great verses 
to a little clan — verses retained only by 
Memory. You would have been but the 
minstrel of your native valley : the wider 
world would not have known you, nor 
you the world. Great thoughts of inde- 
pendence and revolt would never have 
burned in you ; indignation would not 
have vexed you. Society would not have 
given and denied her caresses. You 
would have been happy. Your songs 
would have lingered in all ' the circle of 
the summer hills ; ' and your scorn, your 
satire, your narrative verse, would have 



ROBERT BURNS 201 

been unwritten or unknown. To the 
world what a loss ! and what a gain to 
you ! We should have possessed but a 
few of your lyrics, as 

When o'er the hill the eastern star 
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo ; 

And owsen frae the furrowed field, 
Return sae dowf and wearie O ! 

How noble that is, how natural, how un- 
consciously Greek! You found, oddly, 
in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the 
Tenth Muse : 

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives 
Even Sappho's flame ! 

But how unconsciously you remind us 
both of Sappho and of Homer in these 
strains about the Evening Star and the 
hour when the Day ^erei/tWero fiovXv- 
roiSe? Had you lived and died the pas- 
toral poet of some silent glen, such lyr- 
ics could not but have survived ; free, 
too, of all that in your songs reminds us 
of the Poet's Corner in the ' Kirkcud- 
bright Advertiser.' We should not have 
read how 



202 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning, 
Banishes ilk darksome shade ! 

Still we might keep a love-poem unex- 
celled by Catullus, 

Had we never loved sae kindly, 
Had we never loved sae blindly, 
Never met — or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 

But the letters to Clarinda would have 
been unwritten, and the thrush would 
have been untaught in ' the style of the 
Bird of Paradise.' 

A quiet life of song, fallcntis semita 
vitce, was not to be yours. Fate other- 
wise decreed it. The touch of a lettered 
society, the strife with the Kirk, discon- 
tent with the State, poverty and pride, 
neglect and success, were needed to 
make your Genius what it was, and to 
endow the world with 'Tarn o' Shanter/ 
the 'Jolly Beggars,' and 'Holy Willie's 
Prayer.' Who can praise them too 
highly — who admire in them too much 
the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the 
unsurpassed energy and courage ? So 



Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, 

While we keep a little breath ! 
Drink to heavy Ignorance 

Hob and nob with brother Death ! 

Is not the movement the same, though 
the modern speaks a wilder reckless- 
ness ? 



ROBERT BURNS 203 

powerful, so commanding, is the move- 
ment of that Beggars' Chorus, that, me- 
thinks, it unconsciously echoed in the 
brain of our greatest living poet when 
he conceived the Vision of Sin. You 
shall judge for yourself. Recall : 

Here 's to budgets, bags, and wallets ! 

Here 's to all the wandering train ! 
Here 's our ragged bairns and callets ! 

One and all cry out, Amen ! 

A fig for those by law protected ! 

Liberty 's a glorious feast ! 
Courts for cowards were erected ! 

Churches built to please the priest! 

Then read this : 

Drink to lofty hopes that cool — 

Visions of a perfect state : 
Drink we, last, the public fool, 

Frantic love and frantic hate. 



204 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

So in the best company we leave you, 
who were the life and soul of so much 
company, good and bad. No poet, since 
the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the 
world more assurance of a man ; none 
lived a life more strenuous, engaged in 
an eternal conflict of the passions, and 
by them overcome — 'mighty and might- 
ily fallen.' When we think of you, By- 
ron seems, as Plato would have said, re- 
mote by one degree from actual truth, 
and Musset by a degree more remote 
than Byron. 



XX. 

To Lord Byron. 

My Lord, 

(Do you remember how Leigh 
Hunt 
Enraged you once by writing My dear 
Byron ?) 
Books have their fates, — as mortals 
have who punt, 
And yozirs have entered on an age of 
iron. 
Critics there be who think your satin 
blunt, 
Your pathos, fudge ; such perils must 

environ 
Poets who in their time were quite the 

rage, 
Though now there 's not a soul to turn 
their page. 



206 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Yes, there is much dispute about your 

worth, 
And much is said which you might 

like to know 
By modern poets here upon the earth, 
Where poets live, and love each other 

so ; 
And, in Elysium, it may move your 

mirth 
To hear of bards that pitch your 

praises low, 
Though there be some that for your 

credit stickle, 
As — Glorious Mat, — and not inglori- 
ous Nichol. 

This kind of writing is my pet aversion, 
I hate the slang, I hate the personali- 
ties, 
I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dis- 
persion, 
Of every rhyme that in the singer's 
wallet is, 
I hate it as you hated the Excursion, 
But, while no man a hero to his valet 
is, 



LORD BYRON. 207 

The hero 's still the model ; I indite 
The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would 
write. 

There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot 

rhyme to, 
One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim 

and prim. 
Of him there's much to say, if I had 

time to 
Concern myself in any wise with him. 
He seems to hate the heights he cannot 

climb to, 
He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's 

whim, 
A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt 

on 
Shakspeare, and Moliere, and you, and 

Milton. 

Ay, much his temper is like Vivien's 
mood, 
Which found not Galahad pure, nor 
Lancelot brave ; 
Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood, 
He buries poets in an icy grave, 



208 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

His Essays — he of the Genevan hood ! 
Nothing so good, but better doth he 

crave. 
So stupid and so solemn in his spite 
He dares to print that Moliere could not 

write ! 

Enough of these excursions ; I was say- 
ing 
That half our English Bards are turned 
Reviewers, 

And Arnold was discussing and assay- 
ing 
The weight and value of that work of 
yours, 

Examining and testing it and weighing, 
And proved, the gems are pure, the 
gold endures. 

While Swinburne cries with an exceed- 
ing joy, 

The stones are paste, and half the gold, 
alloy. 

In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest 
force, 



LORD BYRON 209 

Poetic, in this later age of ours 
His song, a torrent from a mountain 
source, 
Clear as the crystal, singing with the 
showers, 
Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course 
Through banks o'erhung with rocks 
and sweet with flowers ; 
None of your brooks that modestly me- 
ander, 
But swift as Awe along the Pass of 
Brander. 

And when our century has clomb its 
crest, 
And backward gazes o'er the plains of 
Time, 
And counts its harvest, yours is still the 
best, 
The richest garner in the field of 
rhyme 
(The metaphoric mixture, 't is confest, 
Is all my own, and is not quite sub- 
lime). 
But fame's not yours alone ; you must 
divide all 



2IO LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

The plums and pudding with the Bard 
of Rydal ! 

Wordsworth and Byron, these the 
lordly names 
And these the gods to whom most in- 
cense burns. 
1 Absurd ! ' cries Swinburne, and in an- 
ger flames, 
And in an yEschylean fury spurns 
With impious foot your altar, and ex- 
claims 
And wreathes his laurels on the golden 
urns 
Where Coleridge's and Shelley's ashes 

lie, 
Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry. 



For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never 
woven 
One honest thread of life within his 
song; 
As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven 
So Byron is to Shelley (This is 
strong !), 



LORD BYRON 211 

And on Parnassus' peak, divinely cloven, 
He may not stand, or stands by cruel 

wrong ; 
For Byron's rank (the Examiner has 

reckoned) 
Is in the third class or a feeble second. 

1 A Bernesque poet ' at the very most, 
And never earnest save in politics — 

The Pegasus that he was wont to boast 
A blundering, floundering hackney, 
full of tricks, 

A beast that must be driven to the post 
By whips and spurs and oaths and 
kicks and sticks, 

A gasping, ranting, broken- winded brute, 

That any judge of Pegasi would shoot ; 

In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far 
gone 
In spavin, curb, and half a hundred 
woes. 
And Byron's style is ' jolter-headed jar- 
gon ; ' 
His verse is 'only bearable in prose.' 



212 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

So living poets write of those that are 

gone, 
And o'er the Eagle thus the Bantam 

crows ; 
And Swinburne ends where Verisopht 

began, 
By owning you 'a very clever man.' 

Or rather does not end : he still must 
utter 
A quantity of the unkindest things. 
Ah ! were you here, I marvel, would you 
flutter 
O'er such a foe the tempest of your 
wings ? 
Tis 'rant and cant and glare and splash 
and splutter ' 
That rend the modest air when Byron 
sings. 
There Swinburne stops : a critic rather 

fiery. 
Animis ccelestibus tantame tree? 

But whether he or Arnold in the right 
is, 



LORD BYRON 21 3 

Long is the argument, the quarrel 
long; 
Non nobis est to settle tantas lites ; 

No poet I, to judge of right or wrong : 
But of all things I always think a fight 
is 
The most unpleasant in the lists of 
song; 
When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo 
Set an example which we need not 
follow. 

The fashion changes ! Maidens do not 
wear, 
As once they wore, in necklaces and 
lockets 
A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron's hair ; 
'Don Juan ' is not always in our pock- 
ets — 
Nay, a New Writer's readers do not care 
Much for your verse, but are inclined 
to mock its 
Manners and morals. Ay, and most 

young ladies 
To yours prefer the ' Epic ' called ' of 
Hades'! 



214 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

I do not blame them ; I 'm inclined to 

think 
That with the reigning taste 't is vain 

to quarrel, 
And Burns might teach his votaries to 

drink, 
And Byron never meant to make them 

moral. 
You yet have lovers true, who will not 

shrink 
From lauding you and giving you the 

laurel ; 
The Germans too, those men of blood 

and iron, 
Of all our poets chiefly swear by Byron. 

Farewell, thou Titan fairer than the 
gods ! 
Farewell, farewell, thou swift and 
lovely spirit, 
Thou splendid warrior with the world 
at odds, 
Unpraised, unpraisable, beyond thy 
merit ; 
Chased, like Orestes, by the furies' rods, 



LORD BYRON 21 5 

Like him at length thy peace dost 
thou inherit ; 

Beholding whom, men think how fairer 
far 

Than all the steadfast stars the wander- 
ing star ! J 

1 Mr. Swinburne's and Mr. Arnold's diverse views 
of Byron will be found in the Selections by Mr. Arnold 
and in the Nineteenth Century. 



XXL 

To Omar Khayyam. 

Wise Omar, do the Southern Breezes 

fling 
Above your Grave, at ending of the 

Spring, 
The Snowdrift of the petals of the 

Rose, 
The wild white Roses you were wont to 

sing ? 

Far in the South I know a Land divine, 1 
And there is many a Saint and many a 

Shrine, 
And over all the shrines the Blossom 

blows 
Of Roses that were dear to you as wine. 

1 The hills above San Remo, where rose-bushes 
are planted by the shrines. Omar desired that his 
grave might be where the wind would scatter rose- 
leaves over it. 



OMAR KHAYYAM 217 

You were a Saint of unbelieving days, 
Liking your Life and happy in men's 

Praise ; 
Enough for you the Shade beneath 

the Bough, 
Enough to watch the wild World go its 

Ways. 

Dreadless and hopeless thou of Heaven 

or Hell, 
Careless of Words thou hadst not Skill 

to spell, 
Content to know not all thou knowest 

now, 
What 's Death ? Doth any Pitcher dread 

the Well ? 

The Pitchers we, whose Maker makes 

them ill, 
Shall He torment them if they chance 

to spill ? 
Nay, like the broken potsherds are we 

cast 
Forth and forgotten, — and what will be 

will! 



21 8 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

So still were we, before the Months be- 
gan 

That rounded us and shaped us into Man. 
So still we shall be, surely, at the 
last, 

Dreamless, untouched of Blessing or of 
Ban! 

Ah, strange it seems that this thy com- 
mon thought — 

How all things have been, ay, and shall 
be nought — 
Was ancient Wisdom in thine ancient 
East, 

In those old Days when Senlac fight was 
fought, 

Which gave our England for a captive 

Land 
To pious Chiefs of a believing Band, 

A gift to the Believer from the Priest, 
Tossed from the holy to the blood-red 

Hand! 1 

1 Omar was contemporary with the battle of Hast- 
ings. 



OMAR KHAYYAM. 219 

Yea, thou wert singing when that Arrow 
clave 

Through helm and brain of him who 
could not save 
His England, even of Harold God- 
win's son ; 

The high tide murmurs by the Hero's 
grave ! 1 

And thou wert wreathing Roses — who 
can tell ? — 

Or chanting for some girl that pleased 
thee well, 
Or satst at wine in Nashapur, when 
dun 

The twilight veiled the field where Har- 
old fell ! 

The salt Sea-waves above him rage and 

roam ! 
Along the white Walls of his guarded 

Home 

1 Per mandata Ducis, Rex hie, Heralde, quiescis, 
Ut custos maneas littoris et pelagi. 



220 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

No Zephyr stirs the Rose, but o'er the 
wave 
The wild Wind beats the Breakers into 
Foam ! 

And dear to him, as Roses were to 

thee, 
Rings long the Roar of Onset of the 

Sea ; 
The Swans Path of his Fathers is his 

grave : 
His sleep, methinks, is sound as thine 

can be. 

His was the Age of Faith, when all the 

West 
Looked to the Priest for torment or for 

rest; 
And thou wert living then, and didst 

not heed 
The Saint who banned thee or the Saint 

who blessed ! 

Ages of Progress ! These eight hun- 
dred years 



OMAR KHAYYAM 221 

Hath Europe shuddered with her hopes 
or fears, 
And now ! — she listens in the wilder- 
ness 

To thee, and half believeth what she 
hears ! 

Hadst thou the Secret ? Ah, and who 

may tell ? 
' An hour we have,' thou saidst. ' Ah, 

waste it well ! ' 
An hour we have, and yet Eternity 
Looms o'er us, and the thought of 

Heaven or Hell ! 

Nay, we can never be as wise as thou, 
O idle singer 'neath the blossomed 

bough. 
Nay, and we cannot be content to 

die. 
We cannot shirk the questions ' Where ? ' 

and 'How?' 

Ah, not from learned Peace and gay 
Content 



222 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Shall we of England go the way he 

went — 
The Singer of the Red Wine and the 

Rose — 
Nay, otherwise than his our Day is 

spent ! 

Serene he dwelt in fragrant Nashapur, 
But we must wander while the Stars 

endure. 
He knew the Secret : we have none 

that knows, 
No Man so sure as Omar once was sure ! 



XXII. 

To Q. Horatins Flaccus. 

In what manner of Paradise are we to 
conceive that you, Horace, are dwelling, 
or what region of immortality can give 
you such pleasures as this life afforded ? 
The country and the town, nature and 
men, who knew them so well as you, or 
who ever so wisely made the best of 
those two worlds ? Truly here you had 
good things, nor do you ever, in all your 
poems, look for more delight in the life 
beyond ; you never expect consolation 
for present sorrow, and when you once 
have shaken hands with a friend the part- 
ing seems to you eternal. 

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus 
Tarn cari capitis ? 

So you sing, for the dear head you 
mourn has sunk for ever beneath the 



224 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

wave. Virgil might wander forth bear- 
ing the golden branch 'the Sibyl doth to 
singing men allow,' and might visit, as 
one not wholly without hope, the dim 
dwellings of the dead and the unborn. 
To him was it permitted to see and sing 
1 mothers and men, and the bodies out- 
worn of mighty heroes, boys and un- 
wedded maids, and young men borne to 
the funeral fire before their parents' eyes.' 
The endless caravan swept past him — 
1 many as fluttering leaves that drop and 
fall in autumn woods when the first frost 
begins ; many as birds that flock land- 
ward from the great sea when now the 
chill year drives them o'er the deep 
and leads them to sunnier lands.' Such 
things was it given to the sacred poet to 
behold, and the happy seats and sweet 
pleasances of fortunate souls, where the 
larger light clothes all the plains and 
dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with 
their own new sun and stars before un- 
known. Ah, not frustra phis was Virgil, 
as you say, Horace, in your melancholy 



Q. HO RATI US FLA CCUS 225 

song. In him, we fancy, there was a 
happier mood than your melancholy pa- 
tience. ' Not, though thou wert sweeter 
of song than Thracian Orpheus, with 
that lyre whose lay led the dancing trees, 
not so would the blood return to the 
empty shade of him whom once with 
dread wand the inexorable god hath 
folded with his shadowy flocks ; but pa- 
tience lighteneth what heaven forbids us 
to undo.' 

Durum, sed levius fit patientia ! 

It was all your philosophy in that last 
sad resort to which we are pushed so 
often — 

1 With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, 
Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair.' 

The Epicurean is at one with the 
Stoic at last, and Horace with Marcus 
Aurelius. 'To go away from among 
men, if there are gods, is not a thing to 
be afraid of ; but if indeed they do not 
exist, or if they have no concern about 
human affairs, what is it to me to live in 



226 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

a universe devoid of gods or devoid of 
providence ?' 

An excellent philosophy, but easier to 
those for whom no Hope had dawn or 
seemed to set. Yet it is harder than 
common, Horace, for us to think of you, 
still glad somewhere, among rivers like 
Liris and plains and vine-clad hills, that 

Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt. 

It is hard, for you looked for no such 
thing. 

O nines wia manet nox 
Et calcaiida semel via leti. 

You could not tell Maecenas that you 
would meet him again ; you could only 
promise to tread the dark path wkh him. 

Ibimus, ibimus, 
Utcunque precedes, suprcmtim 
Carpere iter comites parati. 

Enough, Horace, of these mortuary 
musings. You loved the lesson of the 
roses, and now and again would speak 
somewhat like a death's head over thy 
temperate cups of Sabine ordinaire. 



Q. HORATIUS FLA CCUS 227 

Your melancholy moral was but meant 
to heighten the joy of thy pleasant life, 
when wearied Italy, after all her wars 
and civic bloodshed, had won a peaceful 
haven. The harbour might be treach- 
erous ; the prince might turn to the 
tyrant ; far away on the wide Roman 
marches might be heard, as it were, 
the endless, ceaseless monotone of beat- 
ing horses' hoofs and marching feet of 
men. They were coming, they were near- 
ing, like footsteps heard on wool ; there 
was a sound of multitudes and millions 
of barbarians, all the North, officina gen- 
tium, mustering and marshalling her peo- 
ples. But their coming was not to be to- 
day, nor to-morrow ; nor to-day was the 
budding princely sway to blossom into 
the blood-red flower of Nero. In the 
lull between the two tempests of Repub- 
lic and Empire your odes sound 'like 
linnets in the pauses of the wind/ 

What joy there is in these songs ! 
what delight of life, what an exquisite 
Hellenic grace of art, what a manly na- 



228 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

ture to endure, what tenderness and 
constancy of friendship, what a sense of 
all that is fair in the glittering stream, 
the music of the waterfall, the hum of 
bees, the silvery grey of the olive woods 
on the hillside ! How human are all 
your verses, Horace ! what a pleasure is 
yours in the straining poplars, swaying 
in the wind ! what gladness you gain 
from the white crest of Scracte, beheld 
through the fluttering snowflakes while 
the logs are being piled higher on the 
hearth. You sing of women and wine 
— not all whole-hearted in your praise 
of them, perhaps, for passion frightens 
you, and 't is pleasure more than love 
that you commend to the young. Lydia 
and Glycera, and the others, are but 
passing guests of a heart at ease in it- 
self, and happy enough when their facile 
reign is ended. You seem to me like a 
man who welcomes middle age, and is 
more glad than Sophocles was to 'flee 
from these hard masters' the passions. 
In the 'fallow leisure of life you glance 



Q. HORATIUS FLA CCUS. 229 

round contented, and find all very good 
save the need to leave all behind. Even 
that you take with an Italian good-hu- 
mour, as the folk of your sunny country 
bear poverty and hunger. 

Durum, sed levius fit patientia ! 

To them, to you, the loveliness of your 
land is, and was, a thing to live for. 
None of the Latin poets your fellows, 
or none but Virgil, seem to me to have 
known so well as you, Horace, how 
happy and fortunate a thing it was to 
be born in Italy. You do not say so, 
like your Virgil, in one splendid passage, 
numbering the glories of the land as a 
lover might count the perfections of his 
mistress. But the sentiment is ever in 
your heart and often on your lips. 

Me nee tarn patiens Lacedaemon, 
Nee tarn Larissae percussit campus opimae, 

Quam domus Albuneae resonantis 
Et prasceps Anio, ac Tiburni lucus, et uda 

Mobil ibus pomaria rivis. 1 

1 ' Me neither resolute Sparta nor the rich Laris- 
saean plain so enraptures as the fane of echoing Albu- 



230 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

So a poet should speak, and to every 
singer his own land should be dearest. 
Beautiful is Italy with the grave and 
delicate outlines of her sacred hills, her 
dark groves, her little cities perched like 
eyries on the crags, her rivers gliding 
under ancient walls ; beautiful is Italy, 
her seas, and her suns : but dearer to me 
the long grey wave that bites the rock 
below the minster in the north ; dearer 
is the barren moor and black peat-water 
swirling in tanny foam, and the scent of 
bog myrtle and the bloom of heather, 
and, watching over the lochs, the green 
round-shouldered hills. 

In affection for your native land, Hor- 
ace, certainly the pride in great Romans 
dead and gone made part, and you were, 
in all senses, a lover of your country, 
your country's heroes, your country's 
gods. None but a patriot could have 
sung that ode on Regulus, who died, as 
our own hero died, on an evil day for the 

nea, the headlong Anio, the grove of Tibur, the or- 
chards watered by the wandering rills.' 



Q. HORATIUS FLA CCUS 23 1 

honour of Rome, as Gordon for the hon- 
our of England. 

Fertur pudicae conjujis osculum, 
Parvosque natos, ut capitis minor, 
Ab se removisse, et virilem 
Torvus humi posuisse voltum : 

Donee labantes consilio patres 
Firmaret auctor nunquam alias dato, 
Interque mserentes amicos 
Egregius properaret exul. 

Atqui sciebat, quae sibi barbarus 
Tortor pararet : non aliter tamen 
Dimovit obstantes propinquos, 
Et populum reditus morantem, 

Quam si clientum longa negotia 
Di judicata lite relinqueret, 
Tendens Venafranos in agros 
Aut Lacedasmonium Tarentum. 1 

1 'They say he put aside from him the pure lips of 
his wife and his little children, like a man unfree, and 
with his brave face bowed earthward sternly he waited 
till with such counsel as never mortal gave he might 
strengthen the hearts of the Fathers, and through his 
mourning friends go forth, a hero, into exile. Yet 
well he knew what things were being prepared for him 
at the hands of the tormenters, who, none the less, put 
aside the kinsmen that barred his path and the people 



/ 



232 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

We talk of the Greeks as your teach- 
ers. Your teachers they were, but that 
poem could only have been written by a 
Roman ! The strength, the tenderness, 
the noble and monumental resolution 
and resignation — these are the gift of 
the lords of human things, the masters of 
the world. 

Your country's heroes are dear to you, 
Horace, but you did not sing them bet- 
ter than your country's Gods, the pious 
protecting spirits of the hearth, the farm, 
the field, kindly ghosts, it may be, of 
Latin fathers dead or Gods framed in the 
image of these. What you actually be- 
lieved we know not, you knew not. Who 
knows what he believes ? Parens Dco- 
rum cultor you bowed not often, it may 
be, in the temples of the state religion 
and before the statues of the great Olym- 
pians ; but the pure and pious worship 

that would fain have held him back, passing through 
their midst as he might have done, if, his retainers' 
weary business ended and the suits adjudged, he were 
faring to his Venafran lands or to Dorian Tarentum.' 



Q. HO RATI US FLA CCUS 233 

of rustic tradition, the faith handed 
down by the homely elders, with that 
you never broke. Clean hands and a 
pure heart, these, with a sacred cake and 
shining grains of salt, you could offer to 
the Lares. It was a benignant religion, 
uniting old times and new, men living 
and men long dead and gone, in a kind 
of service and sacrifice solemn yet fa- 
miliar. 

Te nihil attinet 
Tentare multa cade bidentium 
Parvos coronantem marino 
Rore deos fragiliqite myrto. 

Immunis aram si tetigit manus, 
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia 
Mollivit aversos Penates 
Farre pio et saliente mica. 1 



1 ' Thou, Phidyle, hast no need to besiege the gods 
with slaughter so great of sheep, thou who crownest 
thy tiny deities with myrtle rare and rosemary. If but 
the hand be clean that touches the altar, then richest 
sacrifice will not more appease the angered Penates 
than the duteous cake and salt that crackles in the 
blaze.' 



234 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS 

Farewell, dear Horace ; farewell, thou 
wise and kindly heathen ; of mortals the 
most human, the friend of my friends 
and of so many generations of men. 



I 






*+ 



' & 









\° °* 












•w x 






vV T* 



y 






. ..> 









■^c, 

*" 
























/ 


-'*- 
























% 


















^ 


v * 






o 5 






































->•?"'_ 














V 1 










^ 











V^ 


















o o x 






./■-. 



O Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2007 

PreservationTechnologies 



A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 









X A V V 






o o N 












«0 






o 






/ "\ 












^ «* v ; 



A V , V , V 



^ 



V* >; 



O, 






e> 







*> v 






r .■:. 



ft 



00' 



e^ 



^ ^ 



c^ 










